


bury my heart next to yours

by yangonfire



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst, Blood and Violence, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/F, Gun Violence, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, and baseball, angsty backstory/tragic past, it's a zombie au okay there's violence, like lots and lots of angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-04-10 01:22:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4371740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yangonfire/pseuds/yangonfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the living are gone. the dead are hungry.</p><p>or,</p><p>a clexa zombie apocalypse au</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> s/o to mumford and sons for writing the anthem for this fic and inspiring its title. go listen to ["ghosts that we knew"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG4lAUBP1mE&feature=youtu.be&t=13) if you want a quick feel of how this story is going to go.
> 
> anyway, i hope you like zombies.

It isn't morning yet, but soon.

The sky and everything beneath it are painted in shades of grey, grey as death, and the mist that clings to the earth like thick moss to treebark is as still as it. Too early for bird songs, the morning silence throbs in the ears of a solitary figure sitting on the railing of a balcony over the craggy street.

Lexa would be as still as the fog if it weren't for the puffs of breath expelled by the rise and fall of her chest, and the light, nearly noiseless bouncing of her left heel against the rail. Her eyes are motionless, though for all the intensity of her stare, she doesn't really see the crumbling brick of the row houses opposite her. She's waiting, not watching.

She's always up before the sun, whether or not she sleeps. Her nights are long—three times as long as the day, seems to her, even in these summer months when the sun is up more often than it's down. And Lexa knows in an intimate way why the ghosts in stories come out at night.

So she waits, unmoving under the dim sky, as if the less there is between her and the sun the sooner it will show its face over the far horizon, and give her a brief respite before the night comes again to pull her back inside her head and everything there that she never wants to face again.

Time passes, though Lexa has no definite way to measure it. Only the gradual lightening of the sky marks its slow passage, and when she begins to detect a faint glow above the horizon, she takes a slow, deep breath—her body lifts with it and then slumps again as she exhales—and she thinks to herself, _Maybe I'll die today_.

It's a thought she's had countless times in the past, so often that it no longer carries any kind of emotional weight. She just...thinks it. And she breathes, out and in, and out again and watches her white breath fall in with the mist. She doesn't remember when she began dwelling on this idea on purpose, like a ritual each morning. She's long past fearing it, though she hasn't yet begun to hope for it— _no_. Lexa grits her teeth. She'll never do that. The people who slumber in the home behind her depend on her, and they deserve better than for her to wish for death, to abandon them, no matter how often she wonders if it would be a better fate than life.

A repetitive scuffing sound pulls Lexa out of her reverie and she turns her head toward the noise. She knows already what she'll see, and though she is nothing but calm she takes the precaution of letting her foot fall still against the railing. After a long moment, a human figure emerges from the mist, stumbling down the street like a solitary drunk. _Reaper._ A nearly imperceptible pursing of lips is the only change in her face when her suspicions are confirmed. It hasn't seen her, though, and it couldn't reach her if it did. She doesn't bother unholstering her gun.

It moves slowly—it's clearly well into stage three—and Lexa watches its progress with callous indifference. Its left arm ends above the elbow in shreds of flesh more tattered than its clothing, its eyes are sunken deep into its gaunt face. It’s the picture of a nightmare, but Lexa has seen much worse. When she stopped being afraid of them, she almost pitied them and their curse to never find rest unless the mercy of sharp metal found their skull, but that feeling has long since passed as well. It's just another corpse walking, just another streak of grey across the cold backdrop of a world that's been left to die.

But all monotony is broken eventually, and Lexa's ends with a streak of red splitting open the sky.

It draws her attention at once. The reaper forgotten, she watches as the distant spark of ruddy light launches higher into the sky. It's distant enough to be silent to Lexa's ears, but there's no mistaking it. A flare. Her eyes follow it as it reaches its apex, seems to hang there for a moment, and then drifts downward again. Even when it's gone, the sight is burned into Lexa's vision.

Then there's another, and as soon as it falls, a third. Lexa's brow furrows and her lips part, and heavy foreboding presses down on her chest. One flare could mean anything. Three is more deliberate—communication, though the meaning isn't clear. A distress call? A warning? Lexa sets her jaw. Regardless of the intention behind the signal, she knows there's only one thing that matters.

Strangers are a threat. The living are as dangerous to her people as the dead are, these days, and something has to be done.

Lexa swings her legs over the railing and drops to the cement balcony. In her haste, she doesn't notice that the reaper down on the street had seen the flares too, and has started towards it with lifeless breath rattling between its teeth.

 

  
_(three days earlier, afternoon)_

 

Clarke's baseball bat glints in the sunlight, whistles through the air as she takes a couple of practice swings. She doesn’t need to look at Octavia to know that she’s getting impatient, weight on her left leg and rolling the once-white baseball against her right while she waits to throw the next pitch. But Clarke is in no rush. She breathes in deep, savors the moment. The summer sunlight heats Clarke's skin, invigorates her, and trees that tower outside the high fences seem to whisper, constant and gentle— _you're safe, you're safe, you're safe_.

“And our lefty hitter sure is taking a _long ass time_ getting to the plate today.” That’s Raven, calling out from her first base spot in her best commentator’s voice. Clarke tosses a smirk over her shoulder in Raven’s direction as Jasper shouts from his place in the outfield, “Somebody call delay of game!” And Raven shouts back, “That’s a football penalty, genius.”

Clarke shakes her head and she rests the bat on her shoulder, freeing one hand to adjust her dad’s old cap by the brim as she steps up to their makeshift home plate—a chipped floor tile that Miller had swiped from one of the storage warehouses, dropped in the dirt at one end of the shooting range.

She raises her bat and locks eyes with Octavia, who’s got her curveball face on, definitely. Raven continues her commentary, but there’s a soft “Hey, batter batter” from back behind the plate that arrests her attention. Clarke knows if she dared break eye contact with her opponent on the pitcher’s mound, she’d see an affectionate smirk hiding behind the only baseball glove on base, and Finn’s eyes crinkled in the corners, looking up to meet hers. She doesn’t look back, but her heart stutters all the same and when Octavia squares up with third base and then throws her whole body into a pitch, Clarke is distracted enough that she misjudges the ball’s trajectory. The swing she rips through the air just barely manages to clip the underside of the ball.

She’s off running to the sound of a metallic clang and shouts from her friends, but she slows when she notices that Raven’s eyes, following the ball, are moving in the wrong direction. Clarke spins on her heel just as the ball crashes into the coiled barbed wire atop the fence with a loud clatter. And then lands on the wrong side of the fence.

A chorus of groans follows the muffled thud of the ball hitting the dirt, but it’s all good natured enough and slips quickly into laughter, and Octavia is already yelling for her brother.

“Bell! Open the gate, Clarke hit the ball over the damn fence.”

Clarke sees Bellamy look up from where he sits hunched over a table with Miller. Both of them used to join in the ball games until one day when Major Byrne chewed them out, told them that it was too much of a distraction while they were on guard duty. So now they sit by the fence while the others play, their rifles propped, dormant as always, against the side of the table.

“Is it an emergency?” Bellamy says with a raise of his eyebrow.

And Octavia blinks once with a slight shake of her head and calls back, “What?” Clarke thinks she hears an accusation of a stupid question somewhere in that one syllable.

“The ball, is it an emergency?”

Clarke gets a bump on the shoulder and misses the rest of the conversation.

“Nice one, Griffin,” Raven says with a smirk, hands shoved in her pants pockets. How Raven always manages to have a pair of jeans to wear instead of the khaki camo pants the rest of them have on, Clarke can never figure out.

“Hey, Finn was heckling me.”

“Sure, sure,” she says, and now they’re both watching him where he stands, just a few impassable feet away from where the baseball sits on the wrong side of the fence. “Blame it on the boyfriend.”

Clarke doesn’t have an immediate response to that, and she has to wonder if the two of them will ever quite make it past the strain that hovers around the edges of all their interactions. It was bad for a little while, but they got past it. Somehow. And now they’re both quite good at pretending the awkwardness doesn’t exist at all, but the fact of the matter still stares them in the face sometimes, that everyone knew Raven and Finn were always together.   _Always_.  That is, until they weren’t anymore. And everyone knows that’s because of Clarke.

Not that it was Clarke’s fault, even Raven would say that. Shit just happens and they’re all stuck here on this fenced-in pile of dirt and they’re friends, they really are, so they figured it out. Eventually.

Besides, Octavia would have kicked both their asses if they’d tried to stay mad at each other.

She’s jogging over to them now, and apparently she’s convinced Bellamy to break protocol and open the gate for a non-official, non-emergency situation because he’s gotten up from the table and is fumbling with the lock. “God, why is my brother such a pain in the ass?”

Clarke says, “Well he _is_ a Blake,” before she can stop herself, but she can’t quite duck quickly enough when Octavia swats the brim of her cap, knocking it over her eyes.

“Nobody asked you, Clarke,” she grumbles.

Clarke pulls her hat off and shakes out her hair, laughing a little at the pout on Octavia's face.

Raven is smirking, too. "Actually you—"

But she never finishes her sentence, and Clarke's laughter dies in her throat.

Because that's when they hear the screams.

Clarke freezes, eyes locked in the direction of the noise. More screams. And then, gunshots.

"What the hell...."

A clang sounds behind her. She jumps and looks around, but it's only Bellamy. He's dropped the heavy padlock back against the fence and has an intense look in his eyes. "Stay here, everybody, I'm gonna check it out. Miller." He picks up his gun and says, "Everyone stays here. Make sure of it."

The others are gathering around, hurrying in to stand in a close huddle. Every pair of eyes that meet Clarke's is brimming with fear. Finn steps in near her side, and Octavia's voice comes from her right, muttering, "What do we do?"

The clamor from the base isn't letting up. One thought fills Clarke's mind, of her mother. She knows the others are occupied with similar fears. What is happening? Are their families in danger?

Clarke takes a deep breath. Her chest feels heavy and breathing takes more work than usual, but she does her best to ignore it as she glances Finn. "Wait here, okay?"

"Where are you going?"

She ignores the question from Finn because she can see the same one on Miller's face when he turns around to look at her, gun clutched tightly between his hands. He puts himself in her path and she stops three inches away from him.

"Hey, hey, what do you think you're doing?"

"Get out of my way, Miller."

"You heard Blake. Nobody leaves."

"Maybe I'm not leaving."

Clarke glares up at him, and it doesn't take long for him to back down. Not physically, but he glances away with a clench of his jaw and Clarke knows he won't stop her. She jogs past him—tries not to sprint, tries not to look as frantic as the rhythm her heart is thumping against her ribs—and pulls open the door to one of the sheds lining the fence when she reaches it. The chaos from the base is muted when she hurries inside but she can still hear the screams.

She grabs a rifle, her lucky one with the blue electrical tape wrapped around the stock. Though it's the scope she needs right now, she picks up an extra magazine on her way out and stuffs it in her back pocket. Each contains ten rounds rather than the full thirty to reduce waste during training, and she isn't about to risk getting stuck in a hairy situation with only ten shots to her name.

Miller yells something at her from across the field, but she ignores him and pulls herself up onto an old dumpster, and from there onto the shed's metal roof. Either the screams are calming down, or they're dying out, and she needs to know. With clammy hands, she pulls off the caps of either end of her rifle's scope and turns her hat around to get the brim out of the way. Then it's stock to shoulder. Eyes to target. Gun to cheek. She's done this a million times but never once have her hands trembled like this on their grips.

What she sees neither eases or confirms her fears. The field between the radio tower and the command center is full of people. They're quite small in her sights and she can't make out much detail, but they seem calm, almost aimless, in the way they amble about. The normalcy of the scene before her doesn't explain the screams that she can still hear on the breeze, doesn't match the dread like a pit of ice in her stomach.

She's turning her sights towards the barracks when the sound of distant, pounding footsteps reaches her ears, and she lifts her head to look around her scope.

Bellamy is coming back. _Sprinting_ back, breakneck, down the long dirt road between the base and the shooting range. Like he's being hunted by hellhounds. Then suddenly, Clarke sees a human figure—then two, three, more—spilling into the dirt road behind him like water from a burst pipe, and the truth clenches around her like a vice just as she hears it from Bellamy's mouth.

"Clarke, it's a breach! Run!"

She staggers back, and for a moment the thought that her eyes are lying to her—this is not _possible—_ is so overpowering that she can't even remember how to pull air into her lungs. But only for a moment.

Then she snaps into action. "Miller, get the gate open!" She braces a hand on the roof of the shed and drops down, feet scuffing in the dirt. "Everybody else get over here. Now!"

Clarke hurries forward a few paces and lifts her rifle again, tries to keep her hands steady and breathe around the hammering in her throat. They're trained for this, all of them, as well as they can be with their limited resources, but their training wasn't meant to be used. It was _never_ meant to be used.

She doesn't have a clean shot around Bellamy, so she waits, cheek pressed against the cold metal of her gun. Everything in her is screaming at her to pull the trigger, but she waits. Her friends' hurried footfalls are growing closer.

"Clarke, what—"

"Grab guns, mags, there's no time to explain." She's blind to everything but what's between her crosshairs, but she hears curses, gasps, when they reach her, and then the sounds of them dashing into the shed.

Suddenly Bellamy is out of her sights. Her view of his pursuants is clear for the first time and a wave of nausea crashes into her. She _knows_ them. She has a name for every face. But there's red, red everywhere. Dripping from mouths. Coating mauled limbs and spewing from severed arteries.

They should be dying, bleeding out in the dirt. Yet they advance. The nearest of them . . . oh God, she knows him. She's _grown up_ knowing him. Jackson. But his jaw is hanging slack over an open throat, pouring blood, and in place of his warm eyes is a nightmare. He's in range and staggering closer. Terror, guilt, anguish—she feels all of it but there's time for none of it.

Clarke opens fire.

 

  
_(present)_

 

Urgency thrums through Lexa’s veins as she climbs up the fire escape ladder and onto the rooftop.

“Anya,” she says, whispers, because any noise is too much right now.

Anya is crouched over her sniper rifle, peering down the scope towards the east where a fiery gash breaks the grey of the earth from the grey of the sky, and she doesn’t move when Lexa stands beside her. No need to ask if she’d seen—Anya’s eyes are sharper than a hawk’s talons and even if they weren’t, those flares had been like cracks of red lightning across the sky, impossible to miss.

“What do you think they were?”

Anya takes her time like she always does when she’s focusing, but then she drawls, “Hard to tell but they might have been flares.”

Lexa huffs a sigh through her nose. “You know what I meant.” And when Anya says nothing for several seconds, Lexa continues. “Nobody could be foolish enough to set those off without a reason.”

“Must have had a reason, then.”

“Anya. This is not the time.”

Lexa watches as Anya leans to the side just slightly, eyes searching the horizon unaided, before she straightens up and turns to face Lexa. She fixes her with a flat stare and Lexa gives it right back, though it's difficult to be stern when Anya's look is warning her more plainly than words, _Take that tone with me and I’ll knock you on your ass._

"Whoever set off that signal can't have been more than a couple miles away, and that's too close," Lexa says.

"So we wake everybody up and hightail it."

Lexa glances down for a moment but then shakes her head. "No."

A raised eyebrow is the only response she gets.

"If those people had flares then we know they aren't just some half-starved scavengers who were kicked out of their camp. They could be dangerous."

"And if we saw their flares then so did every damn reaper within five miles of here. There are probably hundreds of them."

"I won't let us be taken off guard again." She's sure the haunt that surfaces in Anya's eyes is reflected in her own. "We can’t afford it."

Anya sighs heavily, and turns to pick up her rifle and sling the strap over her shoulder, folding up the tripod. "Lex, what happened wasn't your fault. Stop feeling sorry for yourself."

"It doesn't matter whose fault it was. I won't let it happen again."

And it doesn't matter, she knows that, because where the blame is placed changes nothing, but she also knows that it was absolutely her fault. Lexa clenches her jaw and she's glad Anya is looking away. There's bitterness in her throat and a dry sting in her eyes and she doesn't know how to fight it back without anybody seeing. She realizes that might be exactly why Anya has averted her eyes.

Lexa swallows back her guilt as Anya is turning to her.

"So what are you suggesting? Charge in and shoot up whoever set off the flares?"

"No, of course not," Lexa replies. "We'll go in quietly. We just need to know who they are, and how many, if they're from another group or if they're stragglers. What kind of weapons they—"

"Okay, I get it. But who's gonna go? Us?"

"Yes. Us."

"Great, you and me against the world," she says, a derisive edge to her voice. "The world and a million corpses who want to tear our fucking throats out."

"We can take others, but the more of us there are, the more chance we'll have of being seen."

"What others, Lexa? Indra and Lincoln are hurt—"

"Indra is well enough that she can watch over Lincoln and Tris."

"So we're going to leave the injured to fend for themselves?"

Lexa purses her lips. She doesn't want to argue, but she knows Anya wouldn't be second guessing her if she didn't think this was a genuinely bad idea. "We'll take Quint with us, and Ryder. The rest can stay behind and keep watch."

"I don’t like leaving our people behind. Not when we're this vulnerable."

“We’re more vulnerable if we’re completely blind to a potential threat like this,” Lexa insists. Anya narrows her eyes and Lexa can tell that she sees the truth in her words. "Please, Anya. We can't run. We have people who wouldn't make it. And I won't leave them here without knowing I'll make it back. I need _you_ to cover my six."

Anya cracks a smile after a beat of silence, though perhaps it shouldn't be surprising since Anya's smiles always come at the strangest moments. "The military talk suited Gus more than you."

Her jaw clenches at the sound of the name, but it's more instinct, habit, than emotion. She ignores the comment. "Are you coming or not?"

"On the record, this is reckless and stupid," Anya says, reaching out to nudge Lexa's shoulder and turn her towards the fire escape ladder. "But also yes, I'm coming. Someone's got to keep your ass out of the fire."

 

  
_(two days earlier, morning)_

 

A shudder rocks Clarke's spine and she clamps her eyes shut. She tries to crush the image of all those...those _corpses_ staggering towards her and the sounds of limping feet that stalk her even hours later. It's a battle she can't seem to win. Lifeless breath rattles in her ears and it's all she can do to resist turning towards the sound of a monster she knows is only in her head. She can't fight it, and she can't afford to just stand here, shocked into helplessness, so she turns back to her friends.

The fear hasn't left any of their eyes either, has only developed a look of permanence. Clarke knows none of them have slept any more than she did. Raven is pacing, pacing, her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, stirring up the leaves that blanket the ground. Others are sitting still, staring blankly. They're stunned into silence by the weight of what they've lost. Bellamy, Octavia, Miller, and Monroe stand out in the trees, four points of a compass, their guns the only barrier that keeps hell at bay.

She lays eyes on Finn, where he sits propped against a tree, and heads towards him. If he knew what she's been thinking he would probably remind her that they'd escaped, that she should appreciate that.

The thing is, she not convinced he's out of danger yet.

Clarke had thought he was sleeping, but he opens his eyes when she kneels down next to him.

"Before you ask," he croaks, "I feel great." And then he tries to give her that affectionate smirk of his, but it doesn't reach his eyes. She knows he's in as much turmoil as any of them.

Clarke lays the backs of her fingers against his cheek. "Your fever is worse," she says, "which means you do _not_ feel great." Her own forehead is dampened with a sheen of sweat—the sun has only been up for two hours but the cicadas rattling lazily in the trees are already ushering in another blistering summer day—but Finn's skin is dry despite the fire blazing beneath it. Clarke struggles, probably fails, to keep the worry out of her face and she knows Finn isn't fooled because he takes her hand and presses it lightly.

"Lucky I’ve got a good doctor, then,” he says.

Pursed lips are all Clarke can give him in exchange for his brave attempt at smiling again—it’s impossible to ignore the shallowness of his breath—but she squeezes his hand before releasing it to undo his three shirt buttons. "I hope you're paying her well," she mutters, attempting banter if only to put him at ease. But she pulls aside the fabric of his shirt and something clenches in her stomach.

Red, inflamed, and oozing something that definitely isn’t blood, the skin of his shoulder where that _thing_ had clawed him is showing every sign of infection Clarke’s mother has ever taught her about. Clarke stares at the scabbing furrows raked across his skin for a moment before dropping her hand and sitting back on her feet. There’s nothing she can do, not out here, not without supplies, yet she can’t shake the feeling that she should have prevented this. She shouldn’t have let him insist on getting everyone else through the hole that Bellamy had cut in the fence links before following. The first corpse had caught up too quickly, and Finn would be dead right now if Octavia hadn’t been quick on her feet and sharp with her aim.

Finn is watching her intently, but apparently the silence isn’t to his liking so he says, “Well, I’m glad my future’s looking so bright.”

“Sorry, I’m...just going over how to treat this. The good thing is, this explains the fever.”

“And the bad thing?”

“It needs to be cleaned, first of all. I should have done that yesterday.” _Damn it._

His voice is hoarse and hesitant. “We don’t have anything to clean it with.”

“So that’s first on our to-do list.” The last thing she needs is another kind of guilt to layer on top of all the others, but right now the only thing she has in her first aid kit is placebo. She can’t have him believing he doesn’t have a chance. So, Clarke meets Finn’s guileless eyes with the most honest look she can muster, and lies straight to his face. “You’ll be fine, okay? You will. This isn’t as bad as it looks.”

Clarke pulls his shirt back in place and does up the buttons, and when she meets his eyes again, she can see the fear in them despite the small smile on his lips. Suddenly her throat is tight. In days gone by there were times when she didn't know how to go on without that smile, and that was before, in the eternity ago when they had all been safe behind high fences. Now, when everything has gone wrong, the thought of losing Finn, too, is enough to make her eyes sting. But she can't let him see it, can't let him know she's as afraid as he is, so she leans forward to kiss his cheek. “Wait here, alright?”

“Roger that, Princess.”

She pushes herself up. Now’s not the time to be feeling sorry for herself. None of them can afford that right now, so she swallows hard and picks her way through the group of her friends towards where she can see Bellamy standing a ways out in the woods.

"Bellamy."

He half turns to her as she approaches him, before looking back out into the woods. "Hey. How's Finn?" he asks, low voice rough at the edges with what Clarke assumes to be stress. God knows they're all feeling it.

"That's why I'm here. He's not doing well." Clarke plants herself next to him, her weight on one foot, and stares out at the empty trees. Bellamy's presence is solid, steady as ever, but even he can't calm the tremor of fear in her chest when she says what she came to tell him. "His wound is infected, badly, and if I can't get it cleaned and bandaged he's going to die."

She can see Bellamy looking down at her out of the corner of her eye and she wonders if he heard when her voice had started to crack around that last word.

"Clarke, we can't go back to the base for supplies," is all he says.

"I know that," she says, and it comes out a angrier than she'd meant it to. Thinking of the base, of home, overrun and filled with the mauled, and perhaps still-warm bodies of everyone she's ever known...her mother....

No. She won't go there. Maybe some of them got out.

Clarke clamps the lid shut on her boiling fears and turns to Bellamy. "We need supplies, water at the very least, but Finn can't afford to make much of a walk. He's got to keep his heart rate down to slow the spread of the infection."

Bellamy nods slowly, glancing away from her and thinking for a moment. "So we go to the reservoir." And Clarke nods as well, that's what she's been thinking. The reservoir is on the other side of the base, but it's closer than the nearest town.

"They could have some supplies stored at the boathouse," he continues, "and maybe on the way we'll find more of our people."

Clarke doesn't mean to, but she glances away, and Bellamy doesn't have to guess what that means.

"You don't think anybody else made it."

She takes a deep breath—she has to, to steady herself. "I think we had a warning that nobody else did. We heard the screams, and we knew," she says, struggling to keep the bitterness out of her voice, "we knew by the time we saw the...the people who'd been infected that it was too late to try to be heroes."

"None of us wanted to leave, Clarke," says Bellamy, and his face is grave. "'Never abandon your post,' is what they tell us on the patrol. I did."

"It was that or die, wasn't it?" Clarke's gaze is pulled towards where the base sits, patrolled now only by the dead. It's jarring that only a day ago, death had seemed a thousand miles away. How quickly it had closed in. Now they're surrounded by it.

She glances at Bellamy when she hears him mutter, "God, this is a mess."

"I'd say that's an understatement."

They hold each other's gaze for a few seconds, and then Bellamy sighs. "We'll figure it out," he says, sounding much more sure than Clarke feels, but she can tell it's a stretch for him too. "Come on, let's get everybody together."

Bellamy heads back to the group. Clarke takes a moment to scan the woods before following, and she can see his head turning back and forth, keeping an eye out as he walks. Apparently these kinds of habits form quickly.

"Everybody, listen up!" Several heads turn in Bellamy's direction as Clarke comes to stand beside him, and then he calls out in quick succession, "Octavia, Miller, Monroe. Bring it in. We've got something to talk about."

The three of them head over from their posts, and once the whole group is huddled around Clarke and Bellamy, he looks to her. And the rest of them do the same.

Clarke looks around at each of their faces—the grim set of Octavia’s mouth, Monty, looking lost without his best friend at his side, Harper’s wide and apprehensive eyes. And Finn, pale-faced, brave-faced, watching her from where he sits with Raven. Her eyes linger on his for just a moment before looking back to the people standing around her. Monroe, Sterling, Miller. They all watch her in silence.

“I hate to say this,” she starts, “but we can’t stay here anymore. We’re exposed out here. It isn’t safe.”

Faces fall, but no one objects. They all know she’s right.

“So we have a decision to make. Bellamy and I have been talking, and we think it’s best if we make our way over to the reservoir. The boathouse there can offer us temporary shelter, and there may be some supplies stashed there that—”

“Wait, supplies?” Octavia cuts in. “Clarke, we need to be looking for our people.”

“We will, but our first priority needs to be with the people already here.” She looks pointedly around the group again. “Us. We need food, water, more ammunition.”

Harper pipes in next, arms wrapped tightly around her waist. “What about the others? Won’t they be out here looking for us? The boathouse is so far away….”

“Yeah, my old man was at HQ, maybe there are still people there, or in the other buildings,” Miller says. “We can’t just leave them there. We should go back.”

Agreement echoes around the group, and urgency raises Clarke’s voice when she continues. “No! That is the one thing we can’t do. If we go back, we all die. We were lucky enough to get out as it is.”

“And our families,” Harper’s voice is quieter now. “Did they get out?”

Clarke meets her eyes and is torn between wanting to say something comforting to her, to ease all of their fears, and not wanting to give them any false hope. She wishes she could find a way to do one without the other—they don't have time for this discussion, _Finn_ doesn't—but the longer her silence continues, the more fear she sees in all of their eyes.

She's grateful when Bellamy finally speaks up. "Clarke's right. We need to worry about keeping ourselves alive first, which is why it's so important that we get to the reservoir. It's safer there, but that also makes it the most logical place to go for anybody else who made it out. We should get there as soon as we can, and wait there for others to come."

Clarke sees a few nods from around the circle, and she hurries to reinforce Bellamy's words before anyone else can find a new objection. "I know you all want to find your families," she says. "I do too, but waiting around out here in the woods isn't going to help us do that. The reservoir is the best chance we have. We need to leave, now."

The huddle breaks as Bellamy starts calling out orders, "Grab your guns, make sure your safety's off," but Clarke heads straight over to Finn and Raven.

"Help me get him up, we've got to go," she says.

"Clarke," Raven says, "do you really think he should be taking a hike like this right now?"

"No, I don't, and ideally he wouldn't have to." Clarke crouches down beside them, sitting on her heels.

"He doesn't. One of us can stay here with him and wait for you to get back with supplies."

She knows Raven is volunteering, but she tells herself that isn't why she shakes her head. It _isn't_. "Not a good idea."

"Better idea than making him walk five miles. Clarke, he needs to rest!"

Finn, who had been turning his head back and forth between them, speaks up before Clarke can respond. "Hey," he says in his hoarse voice, "maybe we should ask the sick guy what he feels like doing."

They both look to him, and when he says nothing, Clarke asks, "Do you think you're up to this, Finn? It's a few miles, but when we get there we can all hole up in the boathouse and you can rest for a while."

"I think I can walk as long as I need to," he says. "Nobody should have to stay out here because I have a fever."

"Finn...."

"Raven, I'll be fine. Clarke said it's not as bad as it seems."

Clarke sees Raven turn to her and she makes herself look back, pretends that she doesn't feel that twinge of guilt in her stomach, and she nods. "He'll be okay as long as I can clean his wound," she says, and she hopes to God it isn't a lie. "He needs to get to the reservoir more than any of us."

Only a moment passes before Raven nods her head. "Alright, if we're gonna do this then let's do it."

Clarke squeezes her shoulder briefly, gives her a half smile. "Help me get him up."

They grab his arms and pull him to his feet. Once Clarke is satisfied that he's steady enough to walk unaided, they head to where the group is gathering around Bellamy. It's a tense group, and quiet, each one clutching their guns as if they could ward off evil even with empty magazines. Clarke is about to break away from the group to fetch her own rifle, but it's held out to her before she's taken two steps.

"Thanks," she says, giving Monty a small smile. Then Bellamy is giving the signal to move out, but Clarke catches a glimpse of profound loss on her younger friend's face and she stops him with a quiet voice and a hand on his shoulder before he's turned totally away. "Hey. Monty."

He looks over at her, dark eyes at once empty and full of mourning, and Clarke drops her hand.

"I'm sorry about Jasper."

His eyebrows clench for a moment, almost in a wince, but then he nods his head. She's expecting him to turn away then—the others are walking away—but instead, he faces her. "It doesn't seem real."

"Yeah," she says.  It's all she _can_ say.

Monty looks at the ground and seems thoughtful for a moment. Guns have never fit very well in his hands, not that his ability is lacking but that he's always been more comfortable creating and building than he is blowing holes in anything, even a wooden target. The rifle he holds doesn't suit him now any more than it used to, but Clarke thinks his hands seem sure enough on the black metal and when he looks up again, that surety is reflected in his eyes. A little muddled in his sadness, maybe, but definitely there. "He wouldn't want us to give up, though."

Somehow, Clarke finds it impossible to tell whether that breaks her heart again, or if it helps the pieces begin to find their way back together. Either way she has to speak around a lump in her throat. "We won't."

Monty gives her another nod, this time with the most tentative of smiles, and then he turns to follow the others. Clarke doesn't move. She just tries to breathe, watches their backs receding, and she can't make sense of her own words. Were they a promise? Fragile hope?

Or a lie?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this first chapter turned into mostly set-up, but i hope it wasn't the terribly dull kind of set up that you just want to skip.
> 
> generally, i am motivated most by people screaming at me, so my writer's block will hate you if you leave comments or yell at me on [tumblr](ohmyheda.tumblr.com). but i will love you. thanks for reading!
> 
> -asmy


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> real quickly, i just want to say thank you to everyone who read the previous chapter, and especially to those who left comments. people basically said everything about the chapter that i could ever have possibly hoped they would say, which is extremely gratifying, so...THANK YOU!!
> 
> so without further ado (because who needs more than two months of "ado" amiright...)

  
_(yesterday, evening)_

"I see another one!"

Clarke looks up from tending to Finn's injury when Sterling calls out the warning.

"Has it noticed us?" Bellamy joins him at the open entrance to the boathouse, and his eyes follow the arm Sterling lifts to point out the danger.

"Not yet."

Stifling a shudder, Clarke turns to look out the other end of the boathouse, across the water. Wide open on both ends, one side to the wide field and the other to the water, the building doesn't provide much protection, but it does feel safer than being completely exposed out in the woods. They'd found some supplies, too, stored in the guard closet—clean water in a tank, non-perishables, even a small first aid kit.

Clarke had wasted no time going through the contents of the white box. Aspirin and bandaids, sterile gauze, medical tape, _rubbing alcohol_ —she'd felt like crying from relief. Instead, she'd gotten to work cleaning the inflamed wounds on Finn's shoulder and telling herself he'd be alright.

Or at least, that he wouldn't die from his infection.

Bandaids and a few bites to eat don't do much to change the fact that their fates are _all_ still uncertain, at best. Clarke has tried to focus on what she can control, and foremost in her mind is where they're going to get their next meal. She's hungry, they all are, and though the steady trickle of the dead coming across the field from the base is the most frightening threat they're facing, Clarke's rational side tells her that starvation is by far the most pressing. What little food they'd found here was gone hours ago. The crops aren't nearly ready for harvest, all attempts at catching fish from the reservoir have so far been fruitless, and the food stored at the base is beyond inaccessible to them. If they don't do something soon, Clarke knows they won't make it.

And if that weren't enough, the dead have been making their way across the field at a steady trickle all day. Sometimes they can only be seen from a distance, walking with unnatural motions across the wide field between the boathouse and the tree line that hides the base from view, but sometimes they get too close and a gunshot pierces the air. Clarke doesn't know what they'll do when they run out of bullets.

A stupor seems to have latched itself onto nearly everyone in the boathouse; she doesn't think she's ever seen her friends so quiet. The silence is stifling, or maybe the muggy heat that still blankets the ground after the sun has set is stifling them into silence. Whatever it is, Clarke can't take it anymore.

"I'm going outside for some air," she mutters in Finn's direction, pulling herself up.

The trek to the boathouse had exhausted him and he barely lifts his head from where it's slumped against his chest. "Be careful."

Clarke makes her way down wooden steps and out along the dock, and she doesn't stop until she reaches the very end of it. She swears it feels ten degrees cooler here, over the water, than it had inside the boathouse. It's still hot, but at least she can breathe. A sigh leaves her lips as she sits on the end of the dock. She takes off her hat, feet dangling over the water and arms settling around her waist, and she watches the fireflies dance in the trees along the far shore.

It's always been easier for Clarke's mind to wander when no one else is near, and just being in this place—seldom but eagerly visited—is enough to open an entire chest full of memories, of names that echo now with loss, with regret. Her hands clutch more tightly around her hat when she remembers days spend here with her father, tossing a ball or learning to fish with his hands guiding hers around the pole. And...and Wells had been here too, trailing her for hours as they explored and laughed and reveled in the freedom of summer sunlight. She wishes she could look back at those days without this guilt that still taints her thoughts of him.

But she makes her first real mistake when she thinks of her mother. The sting of this separation is new, undulled, and roiling, turbulent emotions that Clarke has been fighting since the moment she heard the first screams claw their way up her throat and escape in a half-choked sob. Clarke ducks her head, her hand flying up to press against her mouth but there's no stopping the tears.

Not once in her life had Clarke ever cried out of fear. Everything has changed so quickly.

The others have looked up with hope at every sound since they took shelter in the boat house, but Clarke doesn't know if she can let herself believe that anyone is coming for them. And if no one does, what will they do? Where will they go? This place is all they know. It's their home, has been since most of them can remember or even longer, and now there's nothing left for them here. Clarke swallows hard only to shudder under the weight of another sob. She knows what's here—death. Nothing more. The outer fences, just visible through the distant trees here and there, were once their greatest hope of safety. Now they feel like a cage, ringing Clarke in with the dead she cannot bury.

But...they do, quite literally, have the key to this cage.

Suddenly there are footsteps clunking down the wooden dock towards her, and Clarke swipes hastily at her eyes and takes a few deep breaths to try to gulp down the knot in her throat.

"Hey Clarke."

Well, if someone had to find her out here, crying by herself, she supposes Raven is one of her better options.

The footsteps slow a few feet behind her. "Are...you okay?"

Clarke lets out a shaky breath and halfheartedly attempts looking over her shoulder without really turning from where she sits. "No, are _you?_ "

"Well...." She hears the rustle of fabric and imagines Raven shoving her hands into her pockets. "Not really, I guess. Now that you bring it up."

Clarke looks back across the water, and after a moment, Raven makes the rest of the way down the dock and lowers herself to sit down, cross-legged. Clarke's attempts at being discreet while she tries to stop crying aren't exactly effective. Raven doesn't seem to mind though. She sits quietly for a few seconds before saying, in a casual voice, "This fucking sucks, doesn't it?"

Like they'd lost their baseball. Or had been assigned to latrine clean-up for three days in a row. Nothing at all like they'd been chased from their home by cannibalistic corpses that were once the people they had loved.

Well, the people Clarke had loved. Everyone Raven cares about is here, safe for the moment. Of all of them, Raven is the only one not sick with worry over someone she left behind, and Clarke has to fight back the bitter taste of resentment.

"Look what I found, though," Raven continues, and Clarke looks down. An orange tube, plastered with labels. "Flares, three of them, buried under a pile of crap in one of the boxes in the storage closet. And not the lame ones you just light and set on the ground." There's a smug sort of excitement in her voice when she says, "These ones are aerial."

"That's...cool, Raven," Clarke says. She knows Raven has an infatuation with flammable objects but right now hardly seems like the time to indulge it. Not when they don't know how to survive to the end of the week.

"No, it's fucking sweet, actually. Clarke, when I say aerial, I mean like _five-hundred feet_ kind of aerial. Light up one of these bad boys and everyone within miles will be able to see it."

Suddenly connecting the dots, Clarke meets Raven's eyes for the first time. Then she holds out her hand and Raven passes over the flare for Clarke's inspection. Not that she has much to look for, but holding the object, feeling it's weight, makes the possibility for hope seem more viable. More real, even if it's only by a sliver. "You think if our people are out there, they'll see this?"

She shrugs a shoulder, and then says, "Don't see why we shouldn't try it."

Clarke looks at her again. Everyone Raven cares about is here, yes, and yet she's putting her mind to work to find ways they can contact other survivors when nobody else is. Clarke has to bite her lip when her resentment is drown in a wave of affection and a tiny bit of guilt. Apparently her silence has lasted a little too long because Raven lifts an eyebrow, but instead of saying anything, Clarke pulls Raven into a tight embrace.

"Woah-ho- _kay_ , relax," Raven half laughs, but she reaches around and pats her on the back a couple times, and Clarke keeps the hug brief. When she pulls back, Raven tucks a loose strand of brown hair behind her ear before clearing her throat and saying, "I did forget to mention one thing."

"What's that?"

"Bellamy thinks it's a shit idea."

Clarke frowns. "What? Why?"

"Well, he just told me that if survivors could see it for miles around, then so could all those dead...buggers." She takes the flare back before looking down and digging at the weather-worn wood with her thumbnail.

Tension seeps back in through Clarke's skin at Raven's mention of those things that had driven them outside the inner fence, but she tries to keep her tone light. "But...what would one of them want with a flare?"

"Don't know, maybe we should ask the next one that blunders over here."

Clarke doesn't laugh.

Silence falls around them, silence save for the lapping of the water against the dock. Crickets making music in the tall grass, underscored by the chirruping of peepers that Clarke knows she could find clambering along the muddy banks, if she cared to look for them. So, it's not really quiet at all, but it's the kind of undisrupting sound that is more a harmony to her thoughts than it is a melody. And maybe if her thoughts weren't constant turbulence in her soul, she could find the evening sounds peaceful.

A loud splash from a distance makes them both jump and look around.

"The hell is Miller doing?" Raven says from behind her as they watch him crash around in the water.

"Trying to catch a fish, I think."

"With his bare hands?"

A string of expletives floats over on the breeze, and Clarke adds, "I don't think it's going well."

"I can see that." There's a pause, and then she mutters, "God, ingenuity is dead."

Clarke turns to look at her. "Why do you say that?"

"Did you see him even try to scrap together some kind of a net? There's gotta be enough junk in the boathouse to make _something_ that'll work better than his hands." Raven turns back to digging crevices in the wood beneath her and sighs. "Or is that just another one of my worthless, crazy ideas...."

Raising her eyebrows, Clarke leans over to knock her shoulder lightly into Raven's. "I think the flares are a good idea."

"Yeah, well...makes two of us."

The quiet settles in again, but this time it only lasts for a moment or two. If there's anyone here who Clarke can tell what she's been thinking, it's Raven.

"You want to hear _crazy_..." she starts, and Raven looks over with a spark of interest in her eyes. Suddenly Clarke is wishing she'd taken a little bit of time to figure out how to put her thoughts into words, but she threw that chance away so she plows forward. "I don't think we can stay here."

Raven's lips purse just slightly and it's clear she hasn't quite grasped the gravity of what Clarke is proposing. Her mind, brilliant as it may be, has not yet ventured past the boundary of the outer fence. And why should it? These few acres of forest are their entire world. "Well where else are we gonna go?"

Clarke takes a deep breath and then looks out to the distant line of trees at the edge of the lake, lifts a finger so that Raven will follow her gaze. "You see the fence out there?"

And that's all it takes.

"Wait," Raven says, staring at her hard. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

Clarke pulls her legs up onto the dock so she can face Raven. "Just hear me out for a second—"

"Listen Clarke, I'm always down for crazy but we can't go _outside_ , that's completely insane."

"Why?"

Raven sputters for a second, as though the answer is so obvious she can't even find the words to explain it, and Clarke jumps back in.

"We've always stayed here because it's safe," she says, keeping her voice as level as she can. "Well, it's not safe anymore."

"Better than out there."

"Do you _really_ think that? Because I'd say being stuck in a cage with a rabid wolf is worse than being out in the open where you think a rabid wolf _might_ be."

"Or seven _billion_ rabid wolves...."

"Look, Raven." She can tell her friend is about to end the conversation so she reaches out and puts a hand on her arm to stop her from getting up. "I'm not saying we should give up on this place yet, or on finding more of our people. Just that we need to keep all of our options open."

Raven doesn't look even remotely convinced.

"I don't like it either, but we have to face the fact that if we don't do something soon, we're all going to starve. And I think our chances of finding food are better out there—" she tilts her head to the fence "— than they are in here."

A sigh escapes Raven's lips and she slouches over, resting her elbows on her crossed legs. "Maybe." It's a far cry from agreement, but it's better than Clarke thinks she could have hoped for with anyone else.

They hear another splash and string of curses, and Raven mutters, "Somebody's got to help that kid." Then she's pushing herself and stretching a hand down for Clarke. "Come on, let's see what kind of netting we can rig up out of this junk pile."

They head back into the boathouse. Raven stows the flare next to the first aid kit in a backpack they'd found, and then they start rounding up materials. It takes several discarded ideas and a little tough love from Raven, but they end up with a net of sorts that Clarke doesn't think is half bad. But by the time they meet Miller out at the lake, darkness has settled in, and their attempts at catching their next meal without being able to see much of anything turn out to be fruitless.

Tomorrow, Clarke tells herself as she pulls off her hat and settles on the hard floor. They'll try again tomorrow. She glances to the building's entrance, where Sterling still stands watch, before she stretches out beside Finn's sleeping form, ignoring the way her stomach grumbles. It isn't exactly difficult to do in her state of exhaustion.

Her eyes slip closed as easy as breathing, but though she's been awake for far too many hours, it's a fitful sleep she finds waiting for her. She dreams about everything she doesn't want to, wakes with a start at every gunshot that echoes through the boathouse even if they are signals that she still, for the moment, is safe.

It's a scream that jolts her from sleep to tell her when she isn't.

Clarke is sitting up before she's even fully awake. The air is filled with hellish sounds, and when she locks her bleary eyes on the source she thinks for a moment that she's dreaming.

But only for a moment.

Then a cry tears from her throat and she's scrambling back, away from the open entrance, the churning pile of bodies there and the inhuman howls escaping from beneath them. A rush of blood thudding in her ears nearly drowns out sounds. She comprehends nothing but horror, horror, and the way everything in her is screaming at her to run.

She can hear shouting, cursing. A crack splits the air, fills the building like a flash of lightning, slashes through the buzzing in Clarke's head just as her back hits something. She jerks around and can make out Finn's bandaged shoulder, his face. His slumped form, his closed eyes. She clutches his head with shaking hands and he's burning and unresponsive.

Clarke's panic drives her to glance over her shoulder, and in the strobe light of gunshots she can see red. Heads turning towards them. Bodies staggering up, bodies hitting the ground. And God, there are shapes outside in the silvery moonlit darkness, moving towards them.

Run, run, they have to _run_.

And Finn is unconscious.

"Bellamy!" Her shout is nearly drowned in the gunfire but she looks up and sees him fall to his knees on the other side of Finn, and he's grabbing Finn's arms before Clarke can say anything else.

"Get your gun, go, go!"

Clarke feels frantically around in the dark and her hands meet cold metal, and she slings the rifle's strap over her shoulders before she's scrambling to her feet. She helps Bellamy pull Finn's limp body over his shoulders and then pushes him towards the back of the boathouse. Feels someone's hand clutching at her arm. Hears someone shouting at the others and the word resonates through her veins, rattles in her bones.

"Run!"

They stumble through the dark, to the doorway. Clarke can hear the clatter as they spill out down the steps, but the door is narrow and nine people are trying to cram through it at once, so she's forced to stop. She looks back over her shoulder. All she can see is silhouettes, dark on dark, but they're close, too close. Their snarls are in her head and her heart is in her throat.

Finally Bellamy moves in front of her, turning sideways to get Finn through the door, and Clarke follows him, takes the stairs two at a time until her feet hit the dirt.

But a shout from behind her yanks her back around like a hook in her back.

"Help me! Somebody!"

Monroe has her shoulder braced against the door, trying to hold it shut against the flailing arms that push through the crack. But before Clarke can react, somebody runs past her.

"Monty, wait!"

Clarke starts to follow him but a hard hand closes around her forearm.

"Just get away from there! Run!" Bellamy shouts from beside her, but Monty has joined Monroe at the door.

Clarke can barely see in the darkness, and her head struggles to process the barrage of discordant noises that pelt her from all sides. But the crash from inside the boathouse, _that_ she feels like an earthquake in her bones.

The door bursts open. And Monty and Monroe are buried in an avalanche of bodies.

Clarke's heart drops like a stone. She can't breathe past the knot in her throat, can't see past her tears, but nothing can block out the screams.

Clarke is knocked to the side as someone runs into her shoulder, and she barely manages to grab a hold of Harper's wrist before she's out of reach.

"No! Let go!"

She's in hysterics, sobbing, and she nearly yanks out of Clarke's grip before Miller is there. He wraps Harper in both of his arms and hauls her back in spite of her struggles, and Bellamy yells behind them, voice hoarse with emotion, "It's too late, we gotta go!"

A gunshot, and then another, splits the air and Clarke sees a silhouetted head lift from the mass at the base of the stairs. Terror clenches in Clarke's throat, and she spins on her heel with a pang of loss echoing through her like the dying toll of a bell.

_I'm sorry._

Clarke dashes through the group, shifting her gun so that it's ready in her hands. There are far too many shadows out across the open field, drawing near far too quickly. She only has eight rounds left. It's now or never.

"This way!" she shouts, and she hears Bellamy behind her.

"Follow Clarke, go!"

Clarke leads them around the lake shore, and tries not to obey her desperate instinct to break into a sprint. Bellamy, carrying Finn, and Miller, pulling Harper along, would never keep up. But beneath the sounds of her pulse throbbing, and the pebbles crunching under their boots, she can hear their pursuers. And they're close, too close. Staggering footsteps and moans rattling through teeth that drip with blood. Her _friends'_ blood.

Her heart clenches to the point of pain and the next breath that escapes her lips has a sob around its edges. But she doesn't stop. She can't.

They reach the tree line, and Clarke can see the barbed wire atop the high fences glinting in the dim moonlight. She knows the gate is nearby. But Octavia calls out from behind her.

"Clarke, where are we going?"

A deep breath pushes out against Clarke's ribs and she spins around. "We don't have time to discuss this, okay, we have to leave."

"What?"

"Clarke we—"

"No! There _is no time_." Movement from behind her friends yanks her gaze away from them.

The dead are coming.

"Bellamy!" Clarke says, somewhere between a plea and a demand.

He only hesitates a second before he releases his hold on Finn's arm and reaches into his pocket to pull out a chain jangling with keys. It's too dark to see his face when she takes them from him, but she can feel his sharp stare.

Clarke turns at once and hurries to the fence and then along its edge, the others following. It takes only a moment to reach the gate, and she starts fumbling with the lock in the dark.

"Bell...." she hears Octavia start, but her brother cuts her off.

"We don't have a choice, O. There's nothing left for—"

"I see them!"

Clarke's jaw clenches and she chokes down a knot in her throat. Third key, no fit. Fourth, fifth. She nearly jumps out of her boots when she hears another gunshot.

But just one this time, and then Raven's voice. " _Shit_ , I'm out. Clarke?"

"Almost got it."

More gunshots. The keys are rattling in her shaking hands as she jams another one into the lock.

"Clarke!"

And the lock springs open. "Got it!"

Clarke tugs at the gate. It creaks and the corner scrapes obstinately through the dirt, but she gets it open.

"Alright, go, everybody go!" Bellamy's voice rings out.

They dash past Clarke, Bellamy bringing up the rear with Finn's limp body still draped over his shoulders, and Clarke drags the gate shut. She grabs the lock again, and _goddammit_ if her hands would stop shaking....

"Hurry, Clarke!"

She glances up. Her heart kicks into a frenzy and she needs to look back down but her eyes are locked to the trees. The shadows in the darkness are too close and closing in. Footsteps drag through the leaves, flood her head and overwhelm her with the need to flee. But she can't. The gate, the lock. She fights against panic and just manages to click the lock back into place before there's a crash against the other side of the gate.

Clarke jolts away from the impact and stumbles back, barely registering the feel of somebody's hands bracing against her back to steady her. All she can see are shadows on shadows. The rattling breath and the rattling fence and the hands that reach through it, swiping at her, curdle her blood.

She stares for a moment but then something snaps, and she tears her eyes from the swarm of faceless figures. "Go, go," she mutters, grabbing onto whoever she can reach and pushing them away from the fence, and they plunge into the unknown dark that lurks between the trees.

The wordless voices of the dead echo in Clarke's ears long after they're out of hearing. Her eyes skip left and right and left again, attempting to separate shadow from shadow, but it's an impossible task. She keeps her friends in front of her and can't stop glancing over her shoulder. There's a terror in the emptiness she sees there. Her adrenaline fades with every step that pulls her farther from home, and exhaustion replaces it. It saps all the steadiness from her limbs and fills them with a hazy sort of buzz.

Nobody calls for a halt, but at some point after Clarke has begun to stumble over the uneven ground, they all begin to slow as though they realize all at once that they're running to nowhere. Eventually they stop. Silence settles in, broken only by staggered breathing.

And they stand there in the quiet, staring out into the night. Clarke wishes someone would say something, anything to dispel the chill that's seeping into her bones. She knows the rest of them are as lost as she is. Death is behind them, perhaps all around them, though they huddle together as though they can keep it at bay. They're like children, Clarke thinks numbly, fighting to keep their eyes open in the hopes that the monsters under their beds can only come out if no one is watching. Only the monsters are real now, and out here there are no fences, warding off the nightmares with false promises of security. The monsters are real, and nothing anyone could say would change that.

Movement a little ahead of Clarke catches her eye, and there's a quiet groan and a rustling when Bellamy stoops over to lower Finn's body into the leaves that coat the ground. That sparks the life—or the pretense of it—back into Clarke's head and pushes her forward until she reaches Bellamy, and she kneels by Finn's head.

She is still for a moment and simply makes herself remember to breathe, because there's something vast and dense that is swelling in her chest, demanding to be felt. Her hands are starting to tremble again and she balls them into fists. Helplessness, that's what this is, but she can't let herself give in to it.

Her movements feel mechanical—check his temperature, his heartbeat, his breathing. He seems no better or worse than he was before, and her training can provide no explanation for why he's still unconscious. No answers. She's at a loss in so many ways and it presses down against her; her shoulders slump under its weight and she braces a hand on the ground before lifting it again to lay her palm against his feverish forehead.

"Finn?" Her voice comes out low and cracked as though she hasn't used it in days. The sound of it is so small, and the answering silence echoes in her ears and settles heavy in her chest. She swallows hard, tries to clear it. "Finn. _Finn_ , wake up."

He doesn't respond and Clarke bites her lips before letting out a shaky breath, but her words seem to have cut through the stillness around her. She can hear the rustling of leaves as somebody steps closer.

"What's wrong with him?" Raven asks in a tone that is uncharacteristically subdued.

Clarke can feel the waver in her voice before she even speaks, so she doesn't dare open her mouth. She doesn't have anything to say, anyway. Bellamy pushes himself to his feet then and moves out of Clarke's line of sight. Focusing on Finn's heartbeat— _he's still alive, he's still alive_ —and trying to breathe evenly are taking all of her focus.

Miller's angry voice comes from behind her. "How the _hell_ did this happen?"

"I...I left...." Bellamy says haltingly, turmoil punctuating his words with silence. Clarke has never heard him so upset. "I left Sterling on watch. I shouldn't have, I...I should have stayed up with him. He must have fallen asleep." There's a longer pause, then, "And now he...and Monty, and Monroe...."

Someone begins to cry—Harper, by the sound of it, and Clarke can't blame her. Her throat aches from holding back her own despair.

"Bell, what are we gonna do?" Octavia asks, and suddenly the darkness seems thicker, their surroundings even more unfamiliar and threatening.

Leaves crunch under heavy boots, and though Clarke still watches Finn, she knows Bellamy is walking to his sister to hold her close. His voice is a little muffled when he says, "I don't know."

Those words stir something in Clarke. Bellamy is wrong. He does know what they have to do; they _all_ know. They have to keep going, leave their home to decay and the bodies of their friends to lie unburied in the dirt. Clarke can feel them, feel the weight of their loss on her shoulders as though she's carrying them with her the way Bellamy had carried Finn, but though she wishes she could mourn them, she knows they can't. Not yet, not now. They don't have time.

She turns her head from where she sits. "We have to leave." It feels like all she's said in the past three days. Leave, flee. Run for your lives.

But this time, nobody protests. At least not out loud. There's silence, and then Bellamy speaks, sounding as tired as Clarke feels. "We do. We need to find shelter. I think the city down south is our best bet."

"That's _miles_ away," Raven says.

"About five. We can make it there before morning."  Bellamy pauses for a moment.. "And there's a hospital, so even if there's no one there, we might be able to find medicine for Finn."

"How would we find it?" Octavia asks.

"I think I remember where it is. Our house was nearby, and it's where Mom had her doctor visits when she was pregnant with you. You would have been born there if...if things had gone differently." A brief pause follows, and then he says in a voice that's almost wistful, "It would be like going home."

Clarke has to grit her teeth to tear herself away from Finn, but she pushes herself up and turns to face the group. "How many of us have ammo left? I've got eight rounds."

Everyone gives their number, and Bellamy tallies up. Five guns total, two empty. Less than forty rounds of ammunition between them. "Could be worse," he mutters.

" _Nothing_ about this could be worse," growls Miller.

"We could be dead," Bellamy says, rounding on him, and Miller fires back, "Oh, that's worse?"

Raven steps forward. "Shut up, Miller."

Miller opens his mouth but Clarke cuts in. "Everyone, knock it off." Anger and guilt and fear are a hurricane inside her as she looks between their barely visible faces, but she somehow keeps her voice level, stern. "This is a waste of time. We're alive, we're out here alone, and yes, we're in way over our heads. But we know what we have to do first, and that's get somewhere safe."

"There is nowhere out here that's safe," Miller says, moving a couple steps towards her. "Not in the whole damn _world_ for all we know."

"Then we find some place and we _make_ it safe." She remembers her promise to Monty, then, and somewhere beneath the sorrow that accompanies the memory, it steadies her fears like the eye of the storm calms the winds in spite of whatever might lie beyond. "We survive. Unless someone has a better suggestion."

Silence is her only answer until Octavia takes a step forward. "Looks like there's no reason to hang around."

"Alright then," Clarke says. "Bellamy, are you okay to carry Finn again?"

He isn't looking towards her; she can just make out that his head is turned back the way they came, but he answers her quietly. "Yeah."

Clarke turns back to Finn and kneels at his side again. She reaches to hold one of his hands, staring absently downward without really seeing, and from behind her hears Bellamy ask Harper if she'll carry his gun. It hits her with a pang of remorse, as his footsteps crunch through the leaves towards her, that in her haste to flee the boathouse she had forgotten something.

Bellamy crouches down by her side and Clarke tells him in a low voice, "I left my dad's hat behind."

"I'm sorry. I wish we could go back."

"So do I," is all she can say. She's certain Bellamy understands the deeper meaning of her words. An old, worn-out cap—special as it might be to her—is among the least of all the things Clarke wishes they could go back to.

After a brief silence, Bellamy mutters, "Nineteen years. And now this."

Clarke looks down at the hand she holds between her own, and she doesn't have to ask what he means. She doesn't remember _before_ ; she was too young, probably not even walking yet. But Bellamy has memories of it, even if he didn't fully understand what has happening—the outbreak, the hysteria that Clarke has heard so much about. Memories of being adrift in a sea of refugees all fleeing the same inescapable fate. Of passing through the high gates of the base for the first time and finding what had seemed unreachable—safety—and that safety had lasted for nineteen years.

Now the memory of it is like a taunt ringing in Clarke's head. But obligation weighs heavy on her shoulders, compels her to speak, to force hope out into the stifling silence. "We'll figure it out."

They share a look. Clarke can hear the hushed voices of their friends trickling through the darkness, the darkness that renders Bellamy's thoughts a mystery to her. But eventually he nods, though perhaps its the doubt she hides behind her words that he agrees with rather than the words themselves.

Clarke takes one of her hands away from Finn's to check his pulse again, though she doesn't know what she's looking for and she doesn't find it. A heavy sigh pushes its way out of her lungs, and she helps Bellamy pull Finn's body onto his back for the second time that night.

The trek through the woods seems to last an eternity. The silence is dense and the darkness deep. Fear and exhaustion fray Clarke's nerves. She's trapped in her head, running from bloody memories of the last three days and the ghosts that haunt them, but at the same time, every sound that comes from the surrounding shadows sends a shock of panic through her system.

Their journey is uneventful, though, save for a few halts to give Bellamy some rest. Clarke hears Finn groan more than once through his inexplicable, fever-induced delirium. But he doesn't wake, and if she could dwell on anything except this chill like ice where her heart should be, whispering to her that he'll never open his eyes again, she would.

They cross over a narrow creek and then finally, _finally_ , Clarke notices a thinning of the shadows up ahead. Less than thirty paces more, and the trees fall away around them and open to an empty street.

Or, what used to be a street. The pavement before Clarke's feet is cracked to pieces, ripped apart by the forest's encroachment but appearing as though the land had been shattered by an earthquake. The bright moon, hanging low in the western sky, paints the scene before them with long stripes of shallow light or shadow. And across from them, lining the road in either direction, sit dozens of bulky shapes—houses, once, but now conquered by the slow tide of nature's reclamation. Even in the darkness Clarke can see how the roofs have caved, how ivy claws at the walls and with torpid inevitability begins to grind them back to dust.

Octavia is the first to step forward, her gun's barrel angled toward the ground but ready to spring at any moment from dormant to deadly in her hands, and she stops before a crevasse in the street that is overflowing with weeds and tall grass. The leaves strewn over the ground are picked up by a breeze and skitter across the pavement, and Clarke hears Octavia's grim voice carry back through the silence to where they stand.

"We're back, bitches."

 

* * *

 

Clarke watches the stars go out like candles, one by one, through an open hole in the wall. As the sky lightens to a flat canvas of grey, she can begin to see jagged lines just inside the square of negative space created by the wall's black silhouette, the last evidence that there was once a pane of glass where the cool night air now seeps in.

They've taken shelter in the upstairs of one of the abandoned homes. The roof of the building is still in tact, but it smells of rot and must and rodents, and though Clarke sits on the creaky mattress in a stupor of fatigue, her eyes simply won't close. Perhaps her hunger is what's keeping her awake, or the mourning pangs that won't let her _forget_. Finn's head lies in her lap, so still he seems lifeless but for the heat burning through her pants and into her skin. The others can't sleep either. Finn is the only one who won't wake, and Clarke is at a loss. Her fingers comb robotically through the tangles in his hair and she stares blankly out the window because she can't bear to watch him.

From the next room, Clarke hears a whispered conversation begin, though the words are too low for her ears to decipher. It goes on for a few minutes before it is replaced by soft footfalls, and Clarke looks away from the window to see Raven enter the room, followed closely by Bellamy.

Though Clarke is sure no one in the room is sleeping—not Octavia, seated on the dusty floor with her knees pulled up to her chest, or Harper, tucked under Octavia's arm, or Miller, slumped in the corner—lifting her voice feels wrong so she keeps it to a low murmur. "What's going on?"

"The flares," Bellamy says as Raven walks over to where she'd left her backpack, stashed with the only supplies they'd managed to bring with them.

"I thought you didn't like that idea."

"That was before." They both glance over to Raven when she mutters that he wised up, but Bellamy ignores the comment. "Now that we're off base, I just don't see a way we get through this if we don't find help." It's clear he hates to admit it.

Raven drops her backpack to the floor and walks up to the bed until her knees bump lightly against the mattress, her hands now full. "And we should shoot them off before it gets too much lighter out there."

"I agree," Bellamy says, and Clarke nods, looking from Raven to Bellamy and then back.

Raven's eyes are downcast now, watching Finn, and after a pause she asks softly, "Is he okay?"

The sigh that escapes Clarke's lips is silent and shuddering, but she uses an elbow to push herself more upright from where she had leaned against the headboard. "He's not worse," she says, rubbing a hand once over her eyes to clear away the remnants of elusive sleep. "But Bellamy, if we're all awake then I think we should leave as soon as possible to go find that hospital. Finn needs medicine."

"I want to come with you," Octavia says from across the room.

Bellamy turns to his sister. "You should stay here, O, it's safer."

Octavia starts to object, but Clarke is more focused on tucking her hands under Finn's head to move him gently from her lap to the mattress, and she slides over to the edge of the bed while Bellamy and Octavia argue quietly. A part of her wants to linger beside him, hold his hand for a just another minute, but being near him while knowing she's about to leave has put a knot in her throat and she has to get away before she loses this tenuous control of her emotions.

She escapes into the other room and quickly busies herself by checking the magazines of the different rifles propped against the wall there. Not thirty seconds pass before someone enters the room.

Clarke looks over to see Octavia reach down to one of the guns. "We should leave some ammo with the people here."

"Bellamy's letting you come?"

"He's not _letting_ me do shit," she growls. "I'm a damn good shot and I'm coming with you even if he doesn't like it."

Her voice is tinged with finality, but Clarke also hears what she doesn't say, what her gruffness fails to mask. And she gets it. They've all said too many goodbyes—no, they've lost too much without the luxury of a _single_ goodbye—and Clarke knows that Octavia would fight her way through hell if that's what it would take to keep her brother with her.

She stares at Clarke with her chin raised in defiance as if she's expecting Clarke to object. Instead, she nods.

"Good. We could use your help." She turns back to the rifles, but can see Octavia relax beside her. "Are all of the others staying here?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Then we should each take a rifle, I think. We can leave the other two with Raven, Miller, and Harper. If they lie low they should—"

"Clarke, get in here!"

When Raven's voice reaches Clarke's ears, her stomach lurches as if the floor was pulled from beneath her feet and mind reels under the weight of its own thoughts. _Finn. Gone. Too late, too late, too late._ She nearly runs into Octavia in her haste to get back to the other room.

She doesn't even try to keep the panic out of her voice. "What happened, is he okay?"

Suddenly Raven is in front of her, reaching for her arms, and Clarke's first instinct is to fight past her. Her heart so loud in her ears that she's not sure how she heard Raven's voice over the frantic hammering, but somehow she does.

"He's okay, Clarke, he's awake."

Clarke stares at her, mouth agape and speechless, the tension rushing from her body like water down a drain, quickly as it had come. "...Awake?"

Raven nods, but Clarke is already moving around her, around the side of the bed.

"Finn," she says, scarcely daring to hope. She reaches for his hand without thinking as she sits, one leg crossed on top of the mattress so she can better face him. "Finn, can you hear me?"

And, miraculously, he responds. "Clarke."

His voice is a mess, hoarse and dry and barely more than a whisper, but Clarke thinks she has never heard anything more beautiful in her life. She doesn't know whether to cry or to laugh, and the sound that springs from her lips, forced out by the relief flooding her chest, might carry a little bit of both.

"Hi," she says, with a smile on her face that feels strange but not unwelcome. She squeezes his hand and then presses her fingers to his cheek. Still feverish, but awake. And that's what matters.

He attempts to speak again, and Clarke has to lean down closer to him to make out the word. "Water."

"I'm sorry, we don't have any," she tells him, brushing the hair back from his forehead. "But I'm leaving right now with Bellamy and Octavia and we're going to bring some back. Water, medicine, food, whatever we can find." The thought hits her then: he doesn't know. He was unconscious and he doesn't know what they've done, where they are.

It's no use trying to shield him from it, however much she wants to. She watches him for a moment, just able to make out his face in the dim, grey light. "Finn," she says, faltering for a moment. How to tell someone that their home is lost to them forever, that all the people they have loved are most likely dead, that their own life hangs with tremulous uncertainty over the chasm's edge? "Finn, we're...we're not on base anymore. We had to leave, while you were unconscious. Monty, and Monroe, and Sterling...didn't make it."

The silence hangs heavy around them. Clarke glances up to see that the others have all gathered around the bed, huddled close. Nearly all shoulder to shoulder.

She takes a deep breath and looks back down at Finn, though it's too dark to see his reaction. "But we did," she says, forcing the smile back for his benefit. "We made it. And we've got a plan, so just...rest until I get back, okay?" _Don't die before I get back, okay?_ Her smile wavers, then, and she wants a private moment with him but she doesn't quite know how to ask for one, not when they all need so desperately to feel each other's closeness. She looks up again. "We should get ready to leave. Raven, could you grab the flares?"

Raven, Bellamy, and Octavia all turn away, and the attention of the others is more divided. Clarke decides that's the best she's going to get, and when she moves closer Finn, her throat starts to tighten. The others seem to have realized what she wants, and she waits, rubbing her thumb over the back of his hand as they leave the bedside. "How are you doing?" she asks quietly.

His breathing seems labored, and it takes him a moment to speak. "Not so good."

She squeezes his hand, heart sinking at the evident loss of his bravado, however false it might have been before. She leans over him, and her lips tremble when she presses them to his in a soft kiss. His unshaven stubble scratches against her skin.

"You'll be alright," she murmurs when she draws back an inch, and she lays her forehead on his. "And I'll be back soon with what you need. Just sleep." She shifts up to place a kiss to the spot where her head had rested. "Okay?"

She feels him nod, and he whispers, "Okay."

Clarke remains there until she hears her name, then looks around to see Octavia standing in the doorway.

"You could stay," she says. "With Finn. Me and Bellamy can go ourselves if you tell us what to look for."

"No," she says quickly, and though it's hard to pull herself away from him, she does. "I should come." _I can't stay. I can't do nothing._

Octavia nods and leaves the room again, and Clarke moves to follow but pauses in the doorway, turning to look over her shoulder at Miller and Harper where they sit, each with a rifle laid over their knees. "Look after him, will you?" she says.

Miller nods, and Harper says, "We will, stay safe."

Clarke picks up her gun and finds her way down the creaky stairway and out the front door of the abandoned house, and sees Bellamy, Octavia, and Raven waiting for her at the edge of the street. A heavy fog has fallen around them, and everything feels close and quiet. She crosses the lawn to meet her friends, wading through waist-high grass and weeds.

"Want to do the honors, Griffin?" Raven holds one of the flares out to her as she approaches.

"I guess, sure," she says, resting the butt of her rifle on the ground between her feet. "How does it work?"

"Easy. I already took the cap off so you just take it and smack the end of it down on something hard to engage the blast cap." She turns to the street, and Clarke notices a rusty mailbox, which Raven pats a couple of times when she continues. "This will have to do, since Bellamy won't let us use his head."

Octavia snickers, but Bellamy sounds quite unimpressed. "That's cute."

Raven just grins, and hands the flare to Clarke who moves to take her place by the mailbox. "Oh, and make sure you're not pointing it at your face."

"Gee thanks," Clarke says flatly. "What would I do without you?"

"Don't know, but it would be tragic."

Clarke rolls her eyes and rests the end of the flare on top of the mailbox. But she doesn't ignite it yet, instead letting her head fall back to look up at the sky, and she takes a deep breath. Holds it. Shuts her eyes for just a moment. They have no way to know who will see, if anyone will see, but a plea flutters in her heart like a whisper.

_If you're out there, if you're watching...please help us. Don't let us die._

Someone will hear her. Someone will come.

She releases her breath to stir up the mist, steadies her grip, and launches the last dying spark of their hope into the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [apologizes profusely for the complete lack of lexa in this chapter] [apologizes more profusely for killing people] [opens askbox @ohmyheda.tumblr.com for complaints]


	3. Chapter 3

"Bell, can you hold up for _one_ second?"

"What?"

"You sure you know where you're going?"

"Yeah, basically, and it's a hospital. There will be signs."

"God, we're totally lost, aren't we."

"O, we--"

"I fucking _told_ _you_ this would happen."

"Would you _both_ shut up? I heard something."

Clarke moves quickly to the edge of the street until she's right up next to a run-down store front, squinting in the bright mid-morning. Bellamy and Octavia follow her. Her rifle grips are sticky with sweat, the heat and her hunger are making her feel faint, and judging by the heavy breaths she hears behind her, she isn't the only one. If only they had water, or if she could at least rest for a moment...but she knows there isn't time.

A sick game of cat and mouse--that's what this day has been since the three of them left the others at the abandoned house. Clarke's heart has been pounding against her ribcage for hours, and she keeps wondering if it's just going to give out the next time they see a human figure stumble out of an alley. The dead are everywhere, blocking their way, pushing them off course.

"Is it another one?" Octavia whispers.

"I don't know." Clarke peers ahead, searching for movement, but everything is still. "Could have been nothing."

But on cue, she hears it again. A glance over her shoulder tells her that the other two have heard the same thing--a long scraping sound, though it's distant.

Octavia curses under her breath.

"What should we do? Find another way?" Clarke says, just loud enough for the others to hear. Every precious minute that passes is like another alarm in Clarke's head, loud as a gong; they can't afford many more of these detours.

The sound comes again from up ahead, and Bellamy says, "I'm sick of running."

"Well it's better than dying."

"We don't know what's making that sound."

Clarke glances back again. "Yeah, I think we do."

Bellamy clenches his jaw and straightens up a little. "Even if it _is_ what we think, it sounds like there's only one. We can take it out."

"We're really low on ammunition," Clarke mutters, although she's sure he doesn't need a reminder.

Octavia huffs a sigh and moves forward, stepping around Clarke. "Hey, maybe shutting up and _doing_ something is a good idea."

"Wait, Octavia--"

Bellamy reaches forward but Octavia sidesteps like she has eyes in the back of her head.

"I have the most ammo," she says, half turning to look over her shoulder at her brother as she walks. "I'm just gonna go see what it is."

Bellamy's sigh sounds more like a growl, but he follows her, and Clarke isn't about to get left behind so she does the same. They hug the sides of the buildings as they go. Clarke can't stop glancing behind them; this sense of being pursued dogs her every step and feels like it's becoming permanent. And the scraping is getting louder.

Octavia holds a hand up as they approach a cross street, and it's when Clarke comes to a stop beside Bellamy that she hears that garbled wheezing, just audible around the other sound. Clarke bites her lip, heart racing again.

"Octavia," she whispers, but she might as well have kept quiet for all the attention Octavia pays her. Heart back in her throat, Clarke watches her creep forward until she reaches the corner of the building.

Octavia peeks around the edge. She's still for a moment, but she then she jumps visibly and jerks away, back hitting the wall behind her with a soft thump.

"How many?" Bellamy asks.

"Uh..." she whispers between heavy breaths. She looks uncharacteristically shaken. "Shit. Just one. Or, well...part of one."

Clarke's stomach squirms at the implications, and Bellamy looks just as disturbed. " _Part_ of one?" He walks around his sister, up to the corner of the building.

"It, uh...doesn't have legs. It's on the ground, dragging itself. Let's just keep going, it can't move fast enough to catch us." Octavia nudges Bellamy in the back. "Clarke, come on."

Morbid curiosity diverts Clarke's attention to the side as she crosses the street, though reason is telling her she doesn't want to see. Reason was right. It's exactly as Octavia had said--half of a body, legs ripped off by God knows what. Hairless, more skull than face, it locks its pale eyes on Clarke and snarls at her through hideously exposed teeth. Stopped dead where she stands, Clarke watches it grip the crumbling asphalt and pull its maimed half-corpse forward another foot. The fear is there, roiling in her stomach like she's going to be sick, but there's more than that. Something she didn't expect.

"Clarke, what are you doing?" Bellamy says.

She takes a deep breath that shudders in her chest, doesn't look at Bellamy when he walks to her side. "We should kill it."

Bellamy watches her, and she hears Octavia from a little ways down the crumbling sidewalk. "Just leave it, it can't hurt us."

"I know, but..." She pauses, at a loss for a way to tell them that she pities this ghastly creature. It's irrational, she tells herself, and bordeline ludicrous. The thing is _dead_. It has only enough sentience to crawl toward its human prey. She knows it can't be suffering, but at the same time...how could it _not_ be?

"Clarke, we can't spare the ammo." Bellamy's voice is low, and she thinks he might understand.

But he's right, she _knows_ he's right, so she mutters, "Yeah," under her breath and tears herself away, ignoring her inexplicable guilt.

Octavia is waiting for them at the corner of the next block, giving her brother an unamused look. "Where to next, Marco?"

Clarke raises an eyebrow and glances at Bellamy, who is wearing a similar expression to hers. "Marco?"

"You know, Marco Polo? Found a route to China? Seems getting us to this hospital's turning out to be just as tough."

"You're hilarious, O."

"Thanks, I know."

Bellamy starts past Octavia, heads to the left down the side street, and Octavia has just begun to follow him when Clarke speaks up. "Wait a second." She rounds the corner after them.

"Haven't we wasted enough time?" says Octavia.

"Well that's exactly it." Clarke glances over her shoulder, down the shaded alley across the street, uneasiness still festering. "We've been out here for hours and haven't made much progress."

"Don't try to pin that on me, Clarke," Bellamy says crossly.

"I'm not. I'm just saying, the three of us wandering around out here isn't helping Finn."

Octavia frowns. "You said he needs medicine."

"He does, but, I mean...do we even know that there's anything left at the hospital? I don't think we're the only ones who would head there first for medical supplies. The only difference is that everyone else has had nineteen years to take what they need."

"We don't know if anyone else made it." Bellamy's tone is more grim than upset now. "For all we know, we're the _only_ people left alive."

"We're not," Clarke insists, and everything in her rebels against that idea. "We can't be."

Bellamy just lets out a sigh, looks at the ground.

"All that matters right now is that we find something for Finn, and food and water, if we can. It doesn't matter _where_ we find it. And I think we should start looking in these buildings." She glances back and forth between the two siblings. "Places other people might have missed."

Bellamy and Octavia look at each other for a second, but then Clarke sees Octavia's eyes move past her brother, and her body tenses. "Something just moved," she says in a hush.

Clarke follows her gaze, as does Bellamy, and finds herself looking down that alley again. Adrenaline buzzes in her veins, and though she sees nothing, it's hard to be sure what that means. The gap between the buildings is shrouded from the sunlight. "Are you sure? I don't hear anything."

"Yeah, I'm sure." She takes a step forward, peers into the shadows for another moment, then points her rifle to the alley.

And the air explodes with gunfire.

From across the street.

Someone is _shooting_ at them.

She's only frozen for half a second before instinct kicks in. She scrambles, throws herself to the ground behind a low brick wall. Bullets blaze through the air.

She clenches her eyes shut, gasping for breath. _Holy fuck...._

The shooting stops, and now the only sound Clarke can hear is the thundering of her own heart. It takes her a few seconds to remember the other two, but when she does. it only winds up her panic even higher. Had either of them been hit? She glances around and thank God, there's Bellamy, watching her from where he's crouched behind an old van that's tipped on its side. Clarke mouths his sister's name. He nods, but Clarke's relief at knowing she's with him only lasts a second because she can see the self-sacrificial intent on Bellamy's face. He's going to try to give them a chance to get away.

Clarke shakes her head vigorously, and she's clutching her rifle so hard that her knuckles have gone white. She knows she's foolish to think that because the strangers have stopped shooting, they might not start again, but a bizarre swell of something nearer to hope than she's felt for three days has bloomed timidly in her chest. They _aren't_ alone out here.

She doesn't let herself think that maybe that would be better than what they're facing now.

Clarke takes a deep breath, then two. Bellamy is staring at her with raised eyebrows, plainly wondering what her plan is. It's stupid. Maybe the stupidest thing she's ever done in her life, but she has to try.

Pulse pounding in her ears, Clarke pushes herself up slowly, back sliding against the wall, until she can peek over her shoulder towards the shooters.

There's a crack and a section of brick six inches from her face explodes, struck by a bullet. Clarke jerks away from the impact with a yelp, throws herself down again out of the line of fire and lands on her elbow, eyes are clenched against a sharp pain across the bridge of her nose and over her left eye. She claps a hand over her face in an irrational moment of thinking she's been shot. Her ears are ringing but she hears two voices--Bellamy's, shouting her name, and another voice from the other direction. More distant. A female voice, also shouting.

Clarke takes a few moments to breathe. She's bleeding, she can feel the wetness on her palm but Bellamy yells again and she waves a hand in his direction to let him know she's okay. Brick turned shrapnel, that must be what struck her. She drops her hand from her face and opens her eyes. She can see, that's good, but blood is dripping onto her palm. Not so good.

And then that other voice echoes in her head, and the words spoken finally register. _I said hold fire!_ Clarke pushes herself up again, taking care to stay beneath the wall. Hold fire, that was the order given. They have a chance.

They have a _chance._

Clarke locks eyes with Bellamy, wracking her brain, and then she has an idea and starts unlacing one of her boots. Bellamy's looking at her like she's lost her mind, and maybe she has, but she's not about to risk something as vital as her head again just yet. Her boot comes off, her white sock follows, she takes a deep breath, and then she raises an arm in the air and waves the sock back and forth.

She pulls it back just as quickly, and she can only hope that her makeshift white flag was clear enough. Or that people out here will even honor something like that anymore.

Well, nobody shot at her again, and that's better than a bad sign. Clarke hurriedly pulls her sock and boot back on and turns over so she's on her hands and knees, head still below the top of the wall.

"Clarke, what the hell are you doing?" Octavia hisses from somewhere behind her.

But Clarke ignores her. She ignores the thudding of her heart, too, and the way her hands are shaking, and she lifts an arm to wipe the blood trickling down the side of her face on her sleeve. Then she grits her teeth and slowly, very slowly, raises her head above the brick wall.

Dead silence. Clarke peers across the street, but the sun is too bright in her eyes and she can barely make out anything that's hidden in the shadow between the buildings. Just indistinct dark shapes and a glare of negative space from the back of the alley where it opens up into the next street over.

"Clarke, are you crazy?" That's Octavia again, and she's scared, Clarke can tell.

It's then, when Clarke has almost started to wonder if the strangers had gone, that there's movement from the alley. _That_ , Clarke can see. She can only make out a silhouette but she's fairly sure it's somebody's head, looking out from behind something.

And then there's a voice, the same one from before. "Drop your gun. Now." No threats, just an order.

Clarke deliberates for half a second, but that's all it takes.

"It's on the ground," she calls out as she puts it there, trying her best not to let her voice reveal the fear that's pumping adrenaline through her veins, but it's unnerving how exposed she feels knowing that the shadowy figure she's speaking to can see her perfectly. She lifts her hands above the wall to show that they're empty, and then she says deliberately, "I'm going to stand up. Please _do not_ shoot me."

She drops one hand to the wall and pushes herself up slowly. There's sweat in her eyes and she can't fucking see anybody, just that silhouette where she knows a pair of eyes is watching her tremble. She can feel the gaze piercing her like a bullet. She squeezes her hands into fists to stop them from trembling.

"We know you're not alone. Tell your people to come out from behind that van," the voice says. It's youthful and hard at the same time, and Clarke isn't sure if she's talking to a woman, or a girl.

"Uh...." Clarke almost glances back but then decides that might not be wise, and instead holds her not-quite eye contact with the shadow in the alley. "No, they're going to stay there. But I'll come out, and you come out, and...and our people stay back where it's safe. We can talk."

"This is not a negotiation," is all Clarke receives in answer.

She feels a twinge of irritation. "How do we know you're not just going to kill us?"

The silence only lasts for a moment before Clarke sees a strange flash of light from the alley, and then the sound of a gunshot splits the air from behind her. She jerks around and there's a crack as a bullet strikes the ground only a foot from where she stands.

"Shit!" She stumbles back and looks around hurriedly behind her, but whoever has her in their sights is a phantom, invisible. Her heart is pounding in her throat.

"There are more of us than you think, and your people are no safer back there than they would be beside you. Tell them to put down their weapons and join you."

Clarke lets out a shaky breath and then grits her teeth. They really have no other options.

"Octavia," she calls over her shoulder. "Bellamy. Why...why don't you come out here? And we can all talk this over."

The buzz of stress in Clarke's head makes it impossible to track the seconds that pass. She's almost convinced that she's going to die with a bullet through the back of her skull when Bellamy's voice finally breaks the silence.

"Okay we're coming."

Clarke can feel her heart rate begin to slow when she hears their wary footsteps. They reach her side and she can't help but feel a little braver with them there, even if they've left their guns behind, too.

"Clarke, your face..." Octavia whispers.

It must look worse that Clarke would have guessed. She swipes at the blood she can feel trickling down her nose, and she's about to reply when the stranger speaks again. Clarke's heart jumps right back to her throat.

"Now, you. Approach. _Just_ you."

There's no doubt that Clarke is the one being addressed. She can feel Bellamy and Octavia turn to her and she takes a brief moment to breathe before meeting each of their gazes and hoping she looks reassuring. Hoping she doesn't look terrified. "I have to do it," she murmurs, keeping her voice low, firm. "Don't try anything heroic if this goes wrong."

"Clarke--"

She cuts him off, looks at him hard. "No, Bellamy, just get back to the others if you can. That's what matters."

Then she looks forward. Bids them both a silent goodbye, just in case. And she feels Octavia's hand brush her arm as she walks with steady step across the street and into the alley.

The shade offers little relief from the heat, but at least the shadows seem less dark now. Her eyes take a moment to adjust, and Clarke is able to make sense out of the silhouettes. Heaps of rubble. Half withered vines scaling the craggy walls. And three motionless human figures.

Clarke feels as though she's walked straight into the lion's den.

Each of them looks imposing, deadly to even touch. They're dressed all in muted colors, jackets much too heavy for this oppressive heat, and they're armed with knives and guns and stares that are even more menacing. Their faces are covered in uneven smudges of dark paint, some kind of camouflage. Clarke glances at the two large men--one bald-headed and baleful-eyed and the other with a beard as long and tangled as his hair--and then meets eyes with the third member of their group. Clearly the one who has been speaking, she's taller than Clarke but more slight of build, with long, untamed curls swept over her shoulder. She's lounging against the alley wall when Clarke notices her, and when their eyes meet she pushes herself away from it and moves to stand between Clarke and the two men. She looks Clarke over once--looks through her, right to the sweat that's trickling between her shoulder blades--before she locks eyes with her again.

Clarke has never seen a wolf before, but she thinks this must be what it would be like to stare one in the eyes. She certainly feels like she's being hunted. There's a nervous quivering in her stomach, and somewhere in the back of her mind she's doubting her own sanity for daring to come here alone.

Finally, the girl breaks the silence. "Who are you?" Her voice is quieter now, but that hasn't taken the hard edge out of it. Just the opposite; she sounds even more threatening than when she'd been calling out orders.

"I'm Clarke." She pauses, opens her mouth to ask for a name in return, but she's cut off before she can begin.

"I didn't ask your name, I asked who you are."

Clarke frowns. She knows she's not exactly working from a position of strength right now, but damned if she's going to let these people walk all over her. Even if they _do_ look like they've been waging guerrilla warfare for a decade. It's just not how this is going to go.

"How about you give me _your_ name," she suggests in a low voice, tilting her head forward a little as she speaks. "There's no reason not to do this the right way."

The girl blinks once and stares hard, and Clarke thinks she might be surprised, though it's difficult to tell. Then she exhales through her nose as though introductions are the most tiresome and least necessary things in existence before answering. "My name is Lexa."

"Lexa," she repeats, and she nods. The name fits.

Lexa lifts her chin. No trace of anything but hostility has found its way into her eyes, and she asks again, "Now who are you?"

Several possible answers come into her head but she doesn't think any of them are what Lexa is looking for. "I'm not sure I follow."

"Which group are you with?"

"Group?"

"Your people, your camp."

"We don't have a camp," Clarke says, and her eyes flick to the man with the beard when he leans down and mutters something to Lexa.

She nods once in response to whatever he'd said. "You know you've been wandering dangerously close to Tristan's turf."

"I...who?"

Lexa watches her in silence but evidently she doesn't see what she's looking for, and her eyes narrow. "It _was_ you who set off the flares, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Even knowing that you're in a dead zone."

Irritation sparks in her chest and her reaction is to take a step forward. Bad idea, maybe, because all three strangers tense up and something tells her that any one of them could kill her with their bare hands, but she's sure as hell not backing up again. "No, I didn't know that. I have no idea what that is. Nothing you're saying means a damn thing to me." Her heartbeat tumbles over itself when she sees the bald man wrap his fingers around the pommel of a blade at his waist.

"Watch yourself, girl," he growls.

"Quint." Lexa's voice is quiet yet commanding. "Let her speak."

Clarke looks back at Lexa and lowers her voice again. "Listen, I've only been out here a few days. I don't know who Tristan is, I didn't know this was anybody's 'turf'.... I didn't even know there was anyone still alive out here until you people started shooting at us."

Clarke pauses when she sees Lexa's mouth drop open just slightly. Her eyes do another quick sweep over Clarke and suddenly understanding flickers across her face. "You're from the military base."

Clarke takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. She may be relieved that they've finally stopped talking past one another, but the base was home and home is a hole in her chest, and every time she's forced to remember it she can feel it. Raw. Still bleeding. Her throat constricts and she doesn't trust her voice, so she glances away and nods.

"And you left." Lexa sounds incredulous, almost to the point of being amused, but her voice grows harder when she says, "No one ever leaves the base."

"We had no choice," says Clarke. She can't distract herself from the way her heart is constricting, so she ends up looking back at Lexa, searching for even the faintest glimmer of compassion in the shadows of those solemn eyes. "It was overrun."

Lexa narrows her eyes again, lips still slightly parted. Clarke might almost think that she's shocked. "How is that possible?"

"I wish I knew."

"Was it reapers?" Clarke hesitates, so she clarifies, "The dead."

Reapers--so that's what they're called. The word makes her shudder, for it drips with death, and when the images from that day rise like bile in Clarke's throat she does her best to fight them down. She focuses hard on Lexa, anchors herself with their shared gaze. "Yes."

Lexa nods once and glances to the ground when she does so, pursing her lips with a pensive look on her face. When she lifts her head again, she tilts it to one side in the same motion, and Clarke waits under Lexa's thoughtful, quiet study of her. She waits just long enough that the silence has begun to nag at Clarke, to make her want to look away or shift her feet or _something_ , before she finally speaks.

"How many escaped?"

Clarke blinks a couple of times. It takes her a second to gather herself. "I...I'm not sure," she says, and she swallows. She pauses, wondering if there might be a reason for her to withhold anything from Lexa, but she decides against it. If she wants these strangers to help her, she should be honest. "We didn't stay inside the fences for long. There were...reapers everywhere, and--" Oh God, Finn. This is taking way too long. "One of our people is sick and I couldn't get what I needed in there to treat him."

"You're a doctor?"

Something new has slipped into Lexa's voice, and though Clarke can't quite pin it down, she thinks she's found some kind of an opening. She can't screw this up. "Well, not exactly," she says, watching Lexa carefully. "But my mother is--"

"Is she with you?"

Again, Clarke's throat tightens, but she fights through it. "No."

"Then what does that have to do with anything?"

"Just that she's taught me a lot," Clarke says, frowning slightly at the girl's brusque rudeness. "The flu, fevers, broken bones--"

"Bullet wounds?"

"Never specifically that, but I'm sure I could handle it if I had access to a few things."

"What would you need?"

Clarke is sure she hears a well-disguised trace of worry buried beneath Lexa's brisk tone. "These aren't...hypothetical bullet wounds, are they."

Lexa purses her lips and then says tersely, "No."

That's it, then. This is their lifeline.

Instinct keeps her voice low. Be unthreatening, but not weak. "Lexa," she says, letting herself take another slow step forward. The bald man--Quint?--doesn't like that, Clarke can tell, but Lexa looks unphased. "If you have people who are hurt, then I can help you. And...my friends and I could use your help, too."

"How many are you?"

"Lexa, you can't--" Quint starts in a growl, but Lexa holds up a hand. To Clarke's astonishment, and though she can see his jaw clench behind his short beard, he obeys, and falls silent.

If Lexa had intended that show of authority, of power, to intimidate Clarke, well...all she can think is that Quint doesn't seem like the kind of man who would back down easily. Especially not to a person half his size. Clarke looks back at Lexa as she drops her hand, and swallows involuntarily. She wonders if she has any idea what kind of people she is dealing with.

"How many?"

Clarke has to do a silent head count, and the truth is hard to face. "Seven, now," she says quietly. The admission stings.

"You've lost people?" Lexa asks, her tone unchanged.

Clarke nods but before she can explain, Bellamy's voice cuts through the alley's shadows.

"Get out here, Clarke, now!"

Lexa's eyes flick past her to the alley's entrance, but Clarke doesn't wait. Turning on her heel, she jogs back out into the sunlight and immediately looks down the street to where Bellamy and Octavia are staring.

There's eight or nine of them. Reapers, their stilted, uneven gaits carrying them towards Clarke and her friends. Moans flood Clarke's ears and she takes an involuntary step backwards.

"Grab the guns," Bellamy says.

But they've scarcely had time to turn to where they'd dropped their rifles when a voice rings out, "No."

Clarke looks back just in time to see Lexa step into the sunlight, flanked still by Quint and the other man. The three of them watch the reapers for no longer than a second or two before Lexa gives a single nod over her shoulder.

And the men don't go for their guns. Cold steel glints in the bright morning when each of them pulls out a blade and they head for the reapers, turned slightly away from each other and keeping close to the other's back. Clarke watches them in unsettled anticipation, flinches when the first head is severed from its body.

It lasts only a moment. The two men make quick work of the reapers in a display of efficient brutality like Clarke has never seen, and when it's done they turn back, stepping over the butchered bodies like they're fallen logs. Like they're nothing. Clarke's empty stomach is churning, and she glances at Bellamy and Octavia to see expressions that suggest they feel just as sick.

From the corner of her eye, Clarke sees Lexa's head snap to the right at the same moment she hears a sound from behind her, and she turns quickly. Another reaper, but only one this time, a ways down the street and moving lethargically.

Clarke watches Lexa take a few measured steps towards it, her face a mask of indifference but her eyes intense. She stops, turns her left shoulder towards the reaper, and Clarke notices that she has pulled out a large knife which she holds at her side by the end of the blade.

Clarke realizes what she's going to do a split second before it happens.

Her arm rips through the air with a force that pulls her body with it and the knife whistles as it flies, meets its mark with a wet thud that makes Clarke cringe. The reaper falls, heavy wooden handle now protruding from the socket of its eye.

Clarke hears a mutter of, "Well _shit_ ," from Octavia that seems simultaneously revolted and awe-struck, but if Lexa heard it, she doesn't acknowledge it.

"Ryder, give Anya the signal that we're moving out," she says, and the man with the tangled beard gives a nod before Lexa turns her hard eyes to Clarke. "I have people who are wounded. Can you help them or not?"

Bellamy steps forward. "Woah, hold on. Clarke, what did you say to these people?"

"We're not waiting," Lexa cuts in, without allowing Clarke time to answer. "Your flares were a signal of a feast to all of the reapers within miles. It isn't safe to be here."

"Yeah, well I think you handle yourselves well enough that you can let us talk this over for half a minute."

She raises an eyebrow at him, unamused. "If that's your choice then I suppose I'll be seeing your corpses in a hoard before too long."

Then she turns on her heel, but Clarke doesn't let her walk two paces before she's moving foward too. "Wait!"

Lexa looks back, and Clarke realizes with an abrupt stop she's closer than she meant to be, close enough to notice the subtle, stormy color of the eyes staring into hers. She stares back for a brief moment. "Yes, I can help you."

"Clarke!"

"Bellamy," she says, spinning around to face him. "Stop, please. You have to trust me." She can tell he's angry with her for taking control like this, for making these decisions without consulting anyone, but before he says anything, Octavia reaches out to grab his arm.

"We need this, Bell," she tells him in a hush. "We're screwed on our own."

Clarke watches his jaw working, grinding at the bitterness of not just this surrender, but she thinks of every loss that has been inflicted on them since this began. But eventually he fixes Clarke with a hard stare and says one word: "Alright."

Her apologetic half-smile is not nearly enough, but it's all she can give him before turning back to Lexa.

"Lexa," she says, and the name feels like supplication in her mouth. "If you take us in, I'll do what I can for your wounded."

Lexa raises a hand to rest on the handle of a pistol holstered on her hip, her face an impassive mask, and as she studies the three of them in silence, Clarke fears that it's already too late. That they've waited just long enough for their only lifeline to slip from reach.

Clarke holds her breath when Lexa lifts her chin, and, finally, she speaks.

"Then lead us to your people."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> taking comments and complaints @ohmyheda.tumblr.com


	4. Chapter 4

Lexa keeps her eyes trained on the back of that blonde head as she follows the strangers from the base down the rubble-littered street. Honestly, she's watching for signs of danger, signs that this Clarke, or one of her friends, has a mind to turn on Lexa and her people. But since she's being honest, she lets herself admit that she hasn't seen anything in a long time that's as pretty as the color that the sunlight paints Clarke's hair.

It's casual admiration of something rare in an ugly world, that's all. Lexa doesn't see the harm.

Besides, Ryder is preoccupied with scouring side streets and straining his ears for any signal that their position is compromised. Quint is probably too busy seething to be of much use to anyone. Anya hasn't re-joined them yet. And Lexa does not trust these strangers, these child soldiers who clutch the black metal of their guns with soft, unscarred hands. They don't know what the world is like, nor all the people left alive in it. They don't know that they should be afraid at this very moment, and always, if they want to keep breathing. They don't _know_ , and Lexa doesn't trust them.

So she watches them, watches Clarke, who in Lexa's mind has already cemented herself in place as their leader, despite the disgruntled reaction earlier from the boy—Bellamy? But it was Clarke who _acted_ , and that is what a leader does.

It's what Gustus used to tell her. Act decisively and don't look back.

She lifts her hand to rest it on the handle of his revolver, holstered as ever on her hip, and she raises her chin in some kind of defiance while she walks. She doesn't know yet how to ignore the heaviness of loss, or to put it behind her. But damned if she doesn't know how to pretend.

They walk on for another silent minute or so before a sudden clunk and a rattle of footsteps sound from above them. Lexa catches all three of the strangers flinch before turning around, clearly panicked as they search for the source of the sound. But Lexa is only mildly exasperated as she glances up, already knowing what she'll see.

Anya is taking two steps at a time down a rattling fire escape stairway on the side of a building, a muffled clang echoing down the street with every footstep. Lexa supposes that if she could help the noise, she would, but still. She surely could have found a quieter way to climb down.

The stairway ends at the second floor, and Anya lowers herself to a ladder that extends halfway to the ground, then drops the rest of the way down to the street, landing on one knee.

"You assholes could have waited for me," she says as she stands and approaches. "Easier to catch up if I know where you're at."

Lexa doesn't respond, but when Anya reaches her she looks back at Clarke. The wheels spinning in her blonde head are practically visible as she looks back and forth between Lexa and Anya. Lexa can see her quickly fitting the pieces together. The sniper rifle over Anya's shoulder, a bullet striking the pavement inches from Clarke's feet, Lexa's words from before, _There are more of us than you think_. Clarke narrows her eyes at Lexa, who can as good as hear her unspoken question. _Only one?_

Clarke has realized she was played, and it's quite clear that she isn't happy about it. Beaten at her own game, maybe? Regardless, Lexa can't suppress a sliver of a smirk. "Lead on."

Clarke holds the glare for another second before spinning on her heel, and the others fall in behind her. Anya keeps close to Lexa's side.

"I was too far away to tell what the hell was happening, so I'm asking now," she mutters after a few steps, voice low enough that no one else will be able to catch the words.

"The military base fell." Lexa looks up at her, and is unsurprised to see shock on her face. It was Lexa's first reaction as well. "These three escaped with four others."

Anya glances at them where they walk in a close-knit bunch at the head of the group, and is silent for a moment. "And now we're babysitting them because...?"

Lexa looks forward as well, looks at Clarke. "She has medical training."

"Which one?"

That throws Lexa for half a second before she remembers the girl walking on the other side of Bellamy and realizes that her meaning wasn't obvious. For some reason it's embarrassing to have to clarify, and she feels the heat rise in her face. Not that she wasn't likely flushed already under this sweltering sun. "The blonde. Clarke."

Anya's look is quizzical, but she moves on. "Isn't she a little young to be a doctor?"

"She's not a doctor. She told me her mother was training her."

She could be mistaken, but she thinks she hears Anya huff a quiet laugh. "So we're out here risking our asses because her mommy showed her how to stick on a bandaid?"

"We're risking our asses," Lexa says quietly, "because I think she's the best chance we have to help Tris, and Indra, and Lincoln."

"And if she lied to you?" Anya asks grimly. "If she _can't_ help them?"

Lexa sets her jaw, her eyes falling again on Clarke's back. "Then we take their guns and leave them for the dead."

It has to be a coincidence—she couldn't possibly have heard what Lexa said—but Clarke turns halfway around at that moment and catches Lexa's gaze. Her face is unreadable, and Lexa wonders if she'll say something. But she doesn't. She just...looks for a few seconds, then turns quickly back around.

And Lexa abruptly feels guilty. It isn’t the kind of guilt that could cause her to reconsider and show them mercy. Never. She’s far too familiar with the heavy cost of compassion, of giving to strangers without expecting anything in return. This _isn’t_ an act of compassion. It’s an alliance, and if she detects even the faintest possibility that Clarke and her friends won’t contribute—or worse, will pose a threat—then they will find themselves alone again before they can so much as blink.

But she is also familiar with the fact that the necessity and the ideal are very rarely one and the same, so she hopes that Clarke isn't lying. She hopes she's who she says she is, that she can do what she says she can. And it isn't just for the sake of her people that Lexa hopes this, but for Clarke's sake as well. Because even if her skills are untested, or even if she's lying, Lexa can see something in Clarke. She's brave, and she's bright, and she's selfless. She doesn't deserve to die.

But she will, if Lexa turns her away. She will.

 

* * *

 

 

They've traded the surroundings of the crumbling city for overgrown suburbs, enduring a tense silence, but Anya cuts through it with a command. "Stop. Everyone stop, be quiet."

The moment their footfalls still, Lexa hears it—a maelstrom of snarls, muted by distance and barely distinguishable from the breeze.

Ryder and Quint step up beside her, and Anya whispers, "Hear that?"

Lexa nods once. They've seen neither rotting hide nor wispy hair of a reaper for over half a mile, and now they know why. They've been drawn to something.

"What's going on?"

Lexa looks at Clarke as she approaches the group, and doesn't fail to notice that she keeps a little distance between herself and them. Her friends follow uncertainly, keeping close to her side, and both of them look equally ready to start throwing punches if they sense a threat. It's admirable, though whatever fight they could put up would certainly be futile.

"How far are we from where you left your people?" Lexa asks her.

"We...should be getting close now, right?" She glances up at Bellamy, and he nods his affirmation.

Lexa meets Anya's eyes. They both know what it means.

"Sounds like they've been busy making friends with the locals," Anya says dryly.

Clarke frowns. "I don't—"

Lexa lifts an arm to point in the direction of the commotion. "Do you hear the reapers?" All three of them nod. "They're riled. That isn't something that happens without cause."

"You're saying our friends are in trouble?" The concern in Bellamy's voice is serious, urgent.

"Assuming they're still alive."

Lexa barely has time to see a shock of fear flash in Clarke's eyes before she's turning hastily away. "Come on, we have to get to them!"

And she runs toward the sound, the other two close behind.

"Clarke!" _Damn it._ Lexa takes off after them, and she unholsters her pistol, keeping the barrel pointed at the ground and her eyes trained ahead as her feet pound the asphalt, scanning the edges of every blind spot ahead of them where she knows death could be lurking. "Clarke, stop!"

She can hear the others following. Clarke and her friends are fast enough, but they're encumbered by their rifles, and when Lexa catches up to the girl with dark hair she grabs her arm and yanks her back to slow her. She ignores the angry protest, and reaches Clarke next.

"I said _stop_ ," Lexa orders as she grabs Clarke by the shoulder, pulls her to a halt. She puts herself between Clarke and the sounds of chaos ahead of them and throws out an arm to stop Bellamy.

Clarke looks angry, to say the least. Fire sparks in her eyes, but Lexa can see the panic that fuels it. "Get the hell out of my way," she demands.

"Clarke, wait. You—"

" _They_ can't wait, we have to help them!"

Clarke tries to push past but Lexa steps into her path again. "We _will_ , if we can," she says sternly as she moves half a step forward, and Clarke seems to involuntarily rock back on her heels, blinking rapidly as if taken by surprise. Lexa keeps her voice low, but uses the slight height advantage she has over Clarke to stare her down. "But none of you has a clue what you're doing, and you are going to get yourself killed unless you _do as I say_."

“We don’t answer to you,” Bellamy says, stepping in closer.

“Do you want to die?” Lexa only spares him a glance before looking back to Clarke and throwing out an arm to point in the direction of the sound. “Do you want _them_ to die?”

And it takes only a second or two before Clarke breaks their eye contact, glancing down and biting the inside of her cheek, but Lexa doesn't see any indication in the stubborn line between her eyebrows, or the still defiant set of her lips, that she's ready to physically back down.

Lexa doesn't see Anya either, until she shoulders through the space between Clarke and the other girl. "I'll take point."

Lexa blinks once, clenches her jaw, then looks past Clarke without backing up. "Quint, up here with us." She drops her voice and spares one more glance at Clarke. "Keep up, don't fall behind Ryder."

Clarke is still staring at her when she turns away.

Anya has already started forward at a jog, cutting through the tangle of overgrowth between houses, and Lexa falls in a little behind her, opposite from Quint. She trades her pistol for the knife at her belt, and though she matches Anya's brisk pace she can feel her heart rate slowing. But she reminds herself that she's never enjoyed confrontation and moves on.

After all, she has much more to worry about than an elevated heart rate. The hideous commotion is loud now. They're getting close, and Lexa keeps watch for signs of movement, signs that other reapers are being drawn to the sound.

A lopsided fence lies ahead of them with the gate hanging askew on its hinges. Anya crosses through it and then stops abruptly, looking to her left. "There."

Lexa follows her gaze. An ungainly mass of bodies is crowded in front of one of the long-abandoned homes. She can see arms extended upwards, pounding on and clawing at the walls.

"Doesn't look like any of them are feeding," Quint mutters from behind Lexa.

Cautiously, and bending instinctually into a crouch, Lexa follows Anya forward through waist-high grass to make room for the others to follow through the gate. Anya drops down to sit on her heels after a few steps, and Lexa takes a knee beside her. The first voice she hears is Bellamy's deep baritone.

"That's the house we left them in." Worry colors his words.

Lexa nods without taking her eyes from the reapers, and notices that a few bodies are lying motionless in the street, ignored by the swarm. Gunned down, maybe. "I think they're okay, for now," she says quietly. Idiots. They've gotten themselves into this predicament. "It seems like they've managed to barricade the door somehow."

"I count sixteen," Anya says.

Four apiece. Well, it isn't ideal, but they've dealt with worse. Lexa pivots on her knee to look at the others behind her. "We'll go out there, take out as many of them as we can before they notice us."

"We know the drill." Quint has already pulled out his long knife.

The girl kneeling beside Clarke speaks up, annoyance obviously masking her unease. "What drill? We've never done this before."

Anya snorts a laugh. Lexa manages not to roll her eyes, but she pins the girl with a hard look. "That's why you're staying here, out of sight and out of our way. Under no circumstances are any of you to fire your weapons, is that clear?"

"But what if one of those... _reaper_ things sees us?" she hisses in a mock whisper.

Lexa purses her lips. "Ryder, your spare knife."

He nods once and pulls it out, hands it to Bellamy who crouches closest to him.

"You have to stab the brain to kill them," she tells him. He clenches his jaw, looks hesitant, but they have no time for more training so Lexa turns away. "Let's go."

They stay crouched, move stealthily down the far side of the street towards the swarm of reapers. Lexa doesn't pause when they draw close. She doesn't stop to check if the others are ready, because these are her people, and that is all she needs to know.

Lexa draws her knife, familiar weight and texture and curve of handle a companion she trusts as much as the people at her back. The others move out to her sides as they swing right to approach the reapers from behind, and adrenaline thunders in her ears, creating a cacophonous harmony with the hideous, wordless voices of the dead.

Fifteen feet out, she picks a target from the roiling crowd of bodies. Ten, starts to stand from her crouch. Five, lifts her knife. Then she's there. She grabs it by its faded shirt collar, and sharp metal meets flesh. In through the temple, out just as quickly. Ignore the blood. She yanks back on the collar to throw the twice-dead body out of the way and feels Anya on her right do the same. She reaches for another, plunges her knife deep, and hears Ryder's voice just as one of the haggard faces turns to lock its eyes on hers.

"Back!"

As one, they move away from the reapers, backing up ten paces and then waiting in a line as the reapers begin to notice the disruption and peel off from the mob, some lurching forward with relative speed and others slowed by dragging feet, but all of them mindless, falling into the trap designed to spread out their numbers and make them easier to pick off. Lexa waits, coiled, for one to find its way inside the reach of her knife.

Ryder strikes first, brings his heavy hammer down on the head of the nearest corpse, caves in its skull with a crunch. Lexa sees the body fall, limp, from the corner of her eye, but her own target is near enough to swipe at her. She steps forward, knocks its arms down with a quick strike and stabs her knife into the sunken crater of its eye socket. Beside her, Anya's blade slings blood into the air and Quint lops off a head.

The moment Lexa extracts her knife, another one is falling on her. With a grunt of effort she braces her palm against its bare and bony chest and stiffens her arm, forcing distance between snapping jaws and her flesh. Clawing fingers grip at her arms but cannot tear through her heavy jacket, and the reaper meets the same fate as the last.

When it falls, silence falls with it. Silence but for heavy breaths and feet shifting on the pavement. Lexa looks to each side and gets a nod from the other three—they're unscathed—before turning her eyes to the bodies at their feet, the bloody signal of their success.

And she just has time to notice the fresh bullet wounds in the chest of her last kill before a shout rings out into the still air.

"Put down your weapons, or I'll shoot you!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HUUUGE thank you to @makenoteofit on tumblr for beta reading this for me.
> 
> and quick question: if you've been following the story, you might have noticed that this chapter is significantly shorter than the others have been. can i ask you to either sound off in the comments or send me a message @ohmyheda on tumblr, letting me know if you prefer longer chapters (with longer waits), or more frequent updates with shorter chapters? my original intention was to continue this chapter and put more into it, but i know it takes me a long time to update sooo yep. let me know! and as always, thanks for reading.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELP. that took forever and probably no one remembers what was happening. here's the last bit of the previous chapter.....
> 
>  
> 
> _The moment Lexa extracts her knife, another one is falling on her. With a grunt of effort she braces her palm against its bare and bony chest and stiffens her arm, forcing distance between snapping jaws and her flesh. Clawing fingers grip at her arms but cannot tear through her heavy jacket, and the reaper meets the same fate as the last._
> 
> _When it falls, silence falls with it. Silence but for heavy breaths and feet shifting on the pavement. Lexa looks to each side and gets a nod from the other three—they're unscathed—before turning her eyes to the bodies at their feet, the bloody signal of their success._
> 
> _And she just has time to notice the fresh bullet wounds in the chest of her last kill before a shout rings out into the still air._
> 
> _"Put down your weapons, or I'll shoot you!"_

Clarke hears the shout and jumps to her feet where she had been waiting, crouched in the tall grass.

"Miller, wait!" She dashes down the street, rifle in hand, and can hear Bellamy and Octavia following. Not one of their new acquaintances has moved to obey and put down their weapons. They stand tense and alert, surrounded by bleeding bodies.

"They're with us," Clarke calls as she approaches. Carefully, making every attempt to prevent her eyes from falling to the carnage at her feet, she picks her way between a body and its severed limb to stand beside Lexa.

"Clarke?" There's movement visible through the hole in the wall that was once an upper story window, and then Miller sticks his head out, squinting in the sunlight and looking warily at the people around her, a question obvious in his expression.

"It's okay," she tells him, as Bellamy and Octavia approach the group. "They're going to help us." She glances over at Lexa, seeking affirmation, but simply meets a somber gaze.

Miller hesitates for a moment, looks to Bellamy, but then pulls back inside the house. Clarke hears him call, "Hey, they're back. Let 'em in."

This is followed by several loud thuds and the sound of wood dragging over wood from inside the door. Clarke glances uneasily down the street, but everything is still.

Then the door creaks open, and Raven looks around its edge. "Well? Get your asses in here."

Sparing one more glance at Lexa, who is staring now with hard eyes up at the second-floor window, Clarke tilts her head towards the open door and says, "This way."

She barely makes it through the open door before a body slams into her.

"What the _hell_ took so long?" Raven demands, arms tight around Clarke for a second or two, and Clarke catches herself searching the empty hallway beyond without really knowing what she's looking for. "We thought you were _dead_."

Raven steps back, and Clarke gives her the closest thing to a smile she can manage. "We got lucky."

"Depends on who you ask," Bellamy mutters, stepping through the door as Raven turns to wrap Octavia in a hug. He walks around the three of them to stand behind Raven and turns to face the door. He settles there like a sentry on high alert, the steel in his eyes as hard as the black metal of the rifle in his hands as he stares over Clarke's head.

The footsteps behind Clarke tell her why.

Raven releases Octavia and the two of them move closer to Bellamy, almost out of instinct, and Clarke is left standing between the two groups. "So who are your friends?" Raven says, and she crosses her arms over her body.

The door clicks shut behind Clarke and plunges the hallway into stifling darkness. She half turns, steps back, but after being outside under the hot sun for so long, can see little more than a group of shadowy figures behind her. "Raven, this is Lexa, and...."

She trails off, realizing she can't remember any other names.

"Anya, Quint, and Ryder," Lexa says, stepping forward, but once again, she seems to have little interest in being introduced. "Clarke, you said one of your people was sick."

Pressing her lips together against a twinge of worry, she nods, just beginning to make out Lexa's face as the leftover glare from the sunlight fades. "Yeah, he's upstairs."

"I'd like to see him." The words are phrased as a request—a strange one, Clarke thinks—but she doesn't detect much room for questioning in Lexa's tone.

Better to play ball than to risk screwing this up. "Oh, uh...sure. Follow me."

Raven falls in step beside Clarke as she leads Lexa to the second floor. Bellamy doesn't seem willing to move an inch, and Octavia doesn't seem willing to leave Bellamy's side, so the rest remain in the entryway. It's a tense atmosphere to say the least, and one that Clarke is perfectly content to leave behind, to say nothing of how impatient she is to see Finn again, to see him breathing, _alive_.

"Did you find medicine for Finn?" Raven asks under her breath.

Clarke looks sideways at her as they climb the stairs, and, not seeing a reason for the hushed tone, answers at a normal volume. "We didn't make it to the hospital." Raven frowns. It's clearly not what she wants to hear, but...well, the truth is a malleable thing when Clarke needs it to be. "We met Lexa out in the city before we got there, and she offered to help. I thought we all had a better chance this way."

She's grateful when Lexa keeps silent behind them, and doesn't decide to fill in any of the blanks.

Miller is still standing at the window with his rifle when they enter the bedroom. Harper looks up from where she sits, perched on the end of the bed near Finn's feet.

"Clarke!"

"Hey." She gives Harper a small smile before looking past her. "How is he?"

But what she sees answers her question. Clarke walks to the bedside and instinctively reaches for Finn's hand. Cold to the touch, his fingers clench at hers with uneven convulsions, and his eyes are half open, roving, bloodshot.

"He's been like this for an hour, maybe," Harper says in a subdued voice as Clarke lays her hand on Finn's head and finds his fever still raging. "I didn't know what to do, Clarke. I'm sorry."

"No, it's...." _It's not okay. Nothing is okay._ Delirium. Muscle spasms. Ragged breath. She's never seen symptoms like this before, and when she speaks, her voice is shockingly calm as if words are somehow detached from her worry. "Thank you for watching him."

But it isn't Harper's voice she hears next.

"You three, leave us."

Clarke looks around, but she sees the expression on Lexa's face—grim, tense—and her words die in her throat.

But Raven speaks up, drawing Lexa's gaze. "Excuse me? Who the hell do you think you are?"

Clarke cuts in quickly. "Raven."

“Since when do we take orders from these people?" she demands, lifting a hand in Lexa's direction and then letting it fall with a slap against her thigh.

Somehow, Clarke manages to twist her mouth into a smile, and it feels like the most blatant lie she's ever told because she knows they can all see fear in her eyes. "It's okay, Raven, can you guys just...give us a minute? Please."

With something far deeper than mistrust in her eyes, Raven looks from Clarke to Lexa, and back again, but she follows Harper and Miller out the doorway.

Silence falls, as stifling as the stale air that fills the room. Clarke drops her eyes to Finn's twitching hand which she still clasps between her own. Her heart is faint but she can feel it racing, as though its speed could keep her beyond the reach of whatever terrible truth she had seen in Lexa's eyes.

But she can't, and when Lexa speaks, the world lurches under her feet.

"He has the plague."

It's strange, to have tears suddenly blurring her vision but to feel as though she's watching the pain that put them there from a hundred miles away, like watching the earth from space. Clarke looks up, and there's a wall up in her mind. An uncompromising rejection of Lexa's words.

"He's going to turn," Lexa continues, still looking at Finn with bleak eyes. "It's already started."

Clarke shakes her head; the only voice she finds is barely above a whisper. "He wasn't bitten."

"The bandage?"

"I...." Clarke looks down at Finn, away from Lexa's grim stare, but a memory of fences and screams slithers into her head, of the blood that had sprayed into the air when Octavia saved Finn from the corpse that had latched onto his shoulder with its clawing hands. It's too vivid, and Lexa's eyes are too piercing, and Clarke wants everything to _stop_. All she can do is clutch more tightly to Finn's hand. "One of them—one of the reapers—it grabbed him, tore the skin." She looks at his face, the bloodshot eyes underneath his trembling eyelids, and lies. "He'll be fine."

The gritty sound of metal sliding against metal draws her attention back to Lexa.

Sudden anger blazes up inside of her, and she latches onto it. It feels good because it isn't fear.

"What are you _doing?_ " Two long strides put her in Lexa's space and she grabs her by her forearm, pushing the knife in her hand down and back. Farther from Finn.

Lexa doesn't shake her off, but her voice is as steely as her eyes. "The only thing that _can_ be done."

" _No_." She can't keep the pleading out of her voice when she says, "I can still save him."

But Lexa simply shakes her head. “You cannot stop this."

Clarke releases Lexa's arm and takes half a step back. "I can't give up on him, either."

"No one comes back from this." Lexa's voice is only becoming more stern. "Not when the sickness is this advanced. So either you let me end it, or you stay behind and you watch him turn. You fight his corpse as it tries to tear out your throat. Is that what you want?"

"No, I…." The horror that she's describing is enough to make Clarke's eyes sting, but Lexa doesn't stop there.

"They're dangerous in the beginning, Clarke. Strong. He'll kill you." A pause. "And if he doesn't, something else will. You were brave today, but you know you need us, and if you stay for this lost cause, we _will_ leave you."

Lost for words, Clarke searches Lexa's eyes for even the faintest signs of light that might shine from beneath the door that has closed on her hope.

But something else flickers across Lexa's face for a brief moment.

"It would be kinder to kill him," she says, almost a whisper, and Clarke sees an ache in her eyes, ponderous and tired. But nearly as soon as Clarke notices the change, Lexa clenches her jaw and her mask is back, hiding whatever might lie beneath.

She didn't imagine it—of that much, Clarke is sure. Lexa has seen loss, death...has lost people to the very _same_ death that Finn now faces, perhaps. How could she have avoided it? No...Lexa has seen this before, experienced it. She _knows_. And it's with that understanding that Clarke lets herself acknowledge what she's known since they left the base—that Finn wouldn't survive. It's a realization that comes with no peace, but settles in her stomach like a heavy stone sinking to the bottom of an ocean.

Tearing her eyes away from Lexa's face, Clarke turns to look at Finn—breath shallow, face haggard, fingers still twitching and clenching at nothing. And she can't pretend any longer. To prolong this would be nothing more than selfish cruelty.

Meeting Lexa's eyes again, she holds out a hand, and she barely has a voice left to speak with when she opens her mouth.

"I should do it." She watches as Lexa’s mouth curves in a subtle frown, perhaps one of confusion. And Lexa doesn’t move, doesn’t relent and hand over the knife. In fact, she seems to be waiting for Clarke to say something more.

“He’s…” she starts again. But she falters. How to explain the inexplicable? How to convey to a stranger the urgency of her need to be the one, and that her need is driven by possession? _He’s mine. You don’t know him. You don’t care about him. It can’t be you_. Clarke lets her head drop and she gives the tiniest shake of her head before steadying her voice and saying, “It has to be me.”

Lexa looks down at Clarke's hand and then back up with an unreadable expression. But she nods after a moment, places the handle of her knife in Clarke's grasp and quietly tells her, "There may be little time."

Clarke nods once and turns away, squeezing the handle until her knuckles turn white because if she doesn’t, she might throw it across the room instead. When she reaches the side of the bed, her trembling fingers press against his side, under his arm, and she finds a space between his ribs where the blade could be inserted to reach his heart.

She lifts the knife but hesitates, rests it on the mattress in her clenched fist instead of aligning its point with the place her fingers mark. His pulse is beating faintly under her touch and though she knows—clinically, theoretically—how it _could_ be done, knowing how to _do_ it is something else entirely. An impossibility.

Her gaze falling on Finn's face is what brings her crashing down.

Tears spill down her cheeks and she can feel her shoulders start to shake under this weight. She doesn't know if Lexa is still standing there. She doesn't care.

"Finn?" Clarke leans over him, lays her forehead against his, trails her free hand through his hair. He won't wake, she _knows_ he won't wake, but she can't stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth, half choked into a whisper. "Finn, don't...don't be scared, okay? I'm gonna help you." Shuddering against a sob, struggling to breathe around the ache in her chest, Clarke shifts to press her lips to where her forehead had rested against his. "I love you," she manages to say. _I'm so sorry_ , echoes in her bones.

And she forces the blade between his ribs.

 

* * *

 

A countdown begins in Lexa's head. She squeezes the grip of her holstered pistol in readiness, because though the boy's hands have fallen still, Lexa knows it won't last. They likely have a few minutes, but Clarke is still leaning over the body, and her hand is still closed around the handle of the knife that pierces his heart. Lexa purses her lips. She listens as Clarke cries. To say she is wholly unaffected by her grief would be inaccurate, but...sympathy comes second to necessity. Always.

Lexa takes a deep breath, exhales through her nose. "Clarke."

She sees her flinch as though she'd forgotten Lexa was in the room, and watches as she straightens part way and tugs reactively on the knife, but her effort lacks will and the blade doesn't come free. A strangled, helpless noise escapes her lips and the sound tugs on something in Lexa’s chest, too. She’s hesitant, wanting to give Clarke a second chance to finish the task she’d been so insistent to do herself, because, well...Lexa _knows_. With an echo of yearning that she will _not_ allow herself to feel, she understands how significant these final mercies can be— _could have been,_ she can’t help but think—to the one who is left behind. But Clarke is trembling, crying, and is making no further moves to extract the knife, so before Lexa even realizes what she’s doing she has moved quietly to Clarke's side and has taken ahold of the knife, overlapping Clarke's grasp. Her free hand braces against the boy's body and a firm pull removes the knife, but the second it's free Clarke yanks her hand out from under Lexa's and stumbles away from her.

And now Lexa doesn't know what to do. She can hear Clarke trying to get control of herself, but time is running out, and...and Clarke doesn't need to be here for what must be done next. She _shouldn’t_ be here. Looking over her shoulder, she notices that Clarke is still shaking and wonders if she should say something to comfort her, or even if she could. Perhaps the best thing would be for Clarke to simply be away from here. Lexa turns away again. “You should gather your friends, tell them it’s time to go.”

For a moment, she hears nothing but Clarke’s unsteady breathing, but then, footsteps. Lexa glances over just soon enough to see Clarke pause in front of the doorway and wipe her eyes hastily on her sleeve, and then she disappears through it.

Lexa turns her eyes to the body on the bed, the pale face, and lays a hand on the dead boy’s forehead. The heat of his fever is already slipping.

“Peace,” she mutters, and then turns his head away from her and finds the hollow at the base of his skull with her knife’s point.

She does it quickly.

Voices are trailing up from the ground floor as Lexa pulls the bedsheet over the boy’s head and then begins to clean her blade, leaving streaks of blood on the musty sheets. That’s when she hears footsteps on the stairs, urgent in their pace. Lexa tenses at the sound, turns to the doorway just in time to lock eyes with Clarke’s friend, Raven, when she stops abruptly in the doorway. Bellamy, following close behind, nearly collides with her. Her eyes flick from the motionless body, to Lexa, to the crimson-stained knife in her hand.

And the blood drains out of her face.

“ _NO!_ ”

She starts forward and Lexa stiffens, fist clenching reflexively at her knife, but Bellamy grabs Raven’s shoulders and she fights him for only a few seconds before she half collapses back in his arms. It’s painful, watching her fall apart.

Bellamy’s eyes are horror-struck as he stares at Lexa. “What did you _do?_ ”

Before Lexa can answer, Clarke steps into the doorway, and Lexa’s gaze is drawn to her. The eyes that meet hers are tearful and aching, and Lexa realizes that Clarke’s friends are still in the dark—they don’t know it was Clarke herself who held the blade. And she realizes at the same moment, with a sudden certainty, that this is likely for the best, because if these people hate Lexa forever, it won’t matter to her. It _would_ matter to Clarke. Lexa is prepared to take this fall for her.

But Clarke doesn’t give her that chance. “Lexa didn’t kill Finn,” she says from where she stands before entering the room and standing between Lexa and the others. Her voice is emotionless, if a little ragged, but far calmer than Lexa expected it would be. “I did.”

Lexa sighs through her nose. So be it. Raven and Bellamy, as well as the others who are now visible through the doorway, have turned their eyes on Clarke.

“…What?” Even whispered, the storm of emotions contained in that single word is palpable. Raven pulls away from Bellamy just slightly, staring.

“He…he would have turned. I had to.”

Even from behind her, Lexa can tell that the pressure of all these gazes is more than Clarke can handle right now, so she sheaths her knife and moves to Clarke’s side. “She did the only thing there was to do. Now it’s time to go.”

“Like _hell_ it is!” Raven snaps, and Lexa is all too familiar with the way her disbelief and sorrow are twisting into rage.

“Raven—”

“Fuck you, Clarke, we can’t leave him here like this!”

Lexa takes another step forward. “There’s no time to bury the body,” she says evenly, “but he can _rest_ here, and that’s a luxury for the living _and_ the dead.”

That last word seems to hit Raven hard, and with devastation etched into her face, she falls silent, so Lexa glances at Clarke. Tearful eyes betray the way she’s clearly tried to make herself numb. No one speaks for a few moments, but the emotions in the room are too high, the heat too stifling, and Lexa needs to breathe.

“We’ll give you a moment, if you would like one.” She speaks to them all but looks at no one. “Don’t be long.”

The crowd at the door parts for her as she slips through them. She tries not to hurry down the stairs, tries to keep her gait steady, but her eyes are locked on the front door and she craves the breeze beyond it. She spares no glance for Quint or Ryder as she brushes past them where they wait, but pushes through the door and out onto the dilapidated porch, leaving the door ajar behind her. Sucking in a deep breath through her nose, Lexa presses her back against the wall behind her, lets her head fall back and her eyes slip closed, and releases the air. In, out, in, focusing on the rhythm of her breathing and on the brick that scratches at her shoulder blades with each movement. The smell of blood from the victims of the earlier slaughter bothers her less than the turmoil in that room had done, where everyone’s eyes were turbulent with new loss.

She has known that feeling, loss. She doesn’t feel it now, but her head spins from its echoes.

In, out, in.

“Lexa.”

Her body flinches instinctively into alertness, fingers clutching tighter at the handle of her knife at her waist despite the familiarity of Anya’s voice. “ _What?_ ”

Anya frowns slightly, looking her over with a discerning gaze. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Lexa says tersely.

Though it couldn’t be more clear that Anya doesn’t believe her, she lets Lexa’s denial stand. “Are those kids coming?”

“The boy upstairs had the plague. We ended it. I told them they could have a minute to say goodbye.”

“It’s been _more_ than a minute.”

“Well, go interrupt their mourning, then, if you’re so eager to leave.”

Anya huffs a sigh and re-enters the house. Crossing her arms, Lexa leans a shoulder back against the wall and tries to let the tension drain out of her body again while she waits.

Soon enough, the door creaks open and Lexa’s people file out, followed by the young strangers. Lexa watches their faces. Anger, misery, confusion, loss. Their eyes are all the same. Clarke is the last one out and she shuts the door behind her, hand lingering on the doorknob for just a moment before she turns around and meets Lexa’s eyes. Her gaze is weighed down with guilt in a way that was absent from anyone else’s face. Lexa doesn’t know if she should say something, so she makes do with giving Clarke a single nod. _You did the right thing_. Clarke keeps eye contact for a moment, but looks at the ground and then follows the others. Lexa falls in behind her.

 

* * *

 

 

The sky darkens and the threat of a storm rumbles in the distance while Clarke stares at the cracks in the pavement slipping by beneath her feet, and wonders if the rain would be heavy enough to drown in. By the time they’re inside another crumbling building, surrounded by strangers, the downpour has soaked them all to the skin. Clarke stands in the dark hallway and meets nobody’s eyes—not of the strangers who stare and mutter to each other, not of her friends who cluster together and shun her in the same action, not of Lexa who tells her quietly that the wounded cannot wait.

As the storm howls into the house through a broken windowpane, Clarke loses herself in her frantic work, leaning over the body of a little girl who is waging an unconscious fight to breathe around the fluid in her lungs. An explosion, Lexa had said, though she offered no more explanation.

The light trickling in through the windows and the glass door is dimmed by the storm clouds, and though the air in the room is muggy and warm, her clothes—wet and plastered to her skin—are making her shiver. Open on the table beside a single kerosene lantern that struggles to fight off the encroaching gloom, sits the first aid kit they’d salvaged from the boathouse an eternity ago, but its contents are inadequate at best for a situation this dire.

Lexa is pacing in and out of Clarke’s line of vision while Anya hovers behind Clarke, one arm crossed over her body and her other hand curled in a loose fist in front of her mouth. Both of them are silent, and neither are doing anything to help Clarke’s sanity.

“Come on,” Clarke mutters under her breath, a flash of lightning illuminating the stark color of blood against pale skin where Clarke makes a small incision to drain trapped fluid out of the girl’s chest cavity. “Come on, breathe.”

But Tris starts to sputter and cough and shake, and Anya breaks her silence. “You don’t have any _fucking_ idea what you’re doing, do you?”

“I’m _trying._ ” Clarke shoots a glance back her, then looks again at Tris, frowning. This isn’t right. If pressure on her lungs is the only problem, she should be getting better. Clarke presses two fingers to the inside of the girl’s wrist and waits for a moment. “She’s clamping down, she’s lost too much blood.”

“And you’re making that _worse_.”

With a clench of her jaw and a deep breath, Clarke turns to face Anya but chooses to ignore her words. “She needs blood, and I obviously can’t type anybody. Are any of you related to her?”

“No,” Anya says tersely, and before Clarke can say anything else, Lexa is stepping forward and hitching up her sleeve.

“Just take mine.”

Clarke shakes her head. “That could kill her. If your blood types are incompatible—”

“She’s already dying.” Anya is practically snarling with sudden aggression that makes Clarke rock back on her heels. “You’re here to give her a _chance_ to live.”

Clarke looks between the two women and for a moment the only sounds in the room are falling rain and fading thunder, but a pitiful, choked gasp pulls Clarke’s attention back to Tris and she has to face the fact that Anya is right. They’re out of options.

“Fine, but….” She lets out a heavy breath. “I need a…a hollow needle and tubing, _something_.”

Lexa replies in a quiet voice. “Anya, ask Indra if we have anything that will work.”

That leaves Clarke alone with Lexa and her steely eyes, so she turns her back and focuses on Tris, smoothing back her hair. The little girl’s face is drawn tight with pain, even in her unconsciousness. Clarke tries not to remember who it reminds her of. “You’re not gonna die, okay?” she whispers, and it’s impossible to ignore the tightening of her throat. “I’m not letting you die.”

Lexa resumes her pacing, and she walks the length of the floor multiple times before another set of footsteps enters the room. Clarke turns around to see Anya approaching, holding out her hand.

“Will this work?”

A syringe. “Yeah, thanks,” she says, and takes it from Anya’s hand. She touches the end of the needle—it seems sharp enough—and then takes the first aid kit from the table and walks to the closest rain-spattered window that lets in flat, grey light. “Come here, Lexa.”

With the rubbing alcohol and gauze from the kit, she sterilizes the needle and then sets it aside on the counter beside them.

“Take off your jacket.”

Lexa complies, and the half-light falls on bare arms as hard as her eyes, on an intricate, black tattoo that brackets her bicep. Under different circumstances, the artist in Clarke might take time to appreciate the design, but stress is gnawing at her and she spares it hardly a glance as she ties a bandage around the upper part of her arm as a tourniquet. Then she takes her by the forearm and rests her hand on top of the counter.

“Make a fist,” she instructs as she’s done a dozen times before, and when she feels muscles and tendons clench under her hand, she leans down, peering in the dim light at Lexa’s skin, waiting for a vein to dilate. Lexa watches her quietly. For a moment, the only sound is rain on the windowpane. Then—

“Lexa.”

She looks over at Anya, but Clarke stays focused on her task, tapping lightly with her index finger just above the crease of Lexa’s elbow.

“She’s not breathing.”

Clarke’s head snaps up. All she sees is Tris’ small body lying motionless on the table, and ice floods Clarke’s veins. She dashes past Lexa. Past Anya. Stops at the table, hands starting to shake at her sides.

“No, no….” Her fingers find the girl’s pulse point. Nothing. And Clarke pulls back. It’s the second time, the _second time_ in a few hours that a body has fallen still under her hands. _No, no, no_.

An arm nudges her aside. Anya takes Clarke’s place, hands braced on the tabletop, face stoic, and says nothing.

She feels faint, sick. There isn’t enough air in the room. “I….” Clarke stares for a few seconds but she gets no sign that Anya had heard her at all, so she looks instead to Lexa, searches her face, desperate. A chilling thought strikes her—what if they’re angry enough at her failure to throw her out on the street? Lexa’s somber eyes reveal nothing, and Clarke is left to plead with her though her voice is giving out. “I did everything I could.”

Watching her steadily for a moment before taking a slow step forward, Lexa nods her head. “You did,” she says. Clarke stiffens as she moves closer, but Lexa walks past her and Clarke turns to watch her place a hand on Anya’s shoulder. They’re somber, still, silent.

And suddenly it’s too much for Clarke. She can’t be in the room any longer with her failure, her _second_ failure, or with the people whose mourning is caused _again_ by her own inadequacy. She turns and before she’s scarcely aware that she’s moved at all, she’s stumbled through the nearest door and out into the yard. Cool rain hits her face, cutting through the humid summer air, but the shudder that rocks her has nothing to do with water that’s dripping down her back.

There’s a tree in the middle of the yard and she moves to it, almost stumbling over the uneven ground. Before long her knees are shaking, and her shoulders, and her chest, and her hands, shaking under a tangible weight like a giant hand pressing down on her, smothering her. It forces her to the ground. It’s only when she notices that the grass beneath her knees is blurred that she realizes she’s sobbing.

Her eyes fall on her hands, resting on her thighs—they’re bloody, still, from her work to save the wounded, but in her mind, the blood belongs to Finn.

The horror that floods her chest is like a knife puncturing her lungs, and she can’t figure out how to breathe around it. A choked sound escapes her and she starts scrubbing at her hands, desperate to be rid of the blood staining her skin, of the guilt staining her every thought, but it won’t come free and all she sees is red, red, _red_.

Then out of nowhere there are more hands, warm hands gripping Clarke’s wrists and stilling her frantic hands, and a firm voice saying her name. Clarke looks up.

Lexa.

Concern is evident in her eyes as she searches Clarke’s, blinking rapidly against the rain water running down her face. She’s crouched down, balancing on the balls of her feet with her elbows resting on her knees, and she releases Clarke’s wrists after a moment of holding her steady..

Clarke’s breathing hasn’t eased and the shivers that have begun to shake her spine from the rain soaking her clothing are melting into the shudders from her tears, so she can’t speak. She can only stare up at Lexa from where she kneels in the muddy grass, but the gaze they share is somehow like an anchor. Something about Lexa’s presence is keeping her above water. Every effort to keep her hands busy and her mind distracted until now has required discipline and struggle, and she’s exhausted by it. But this is effortless, like Lexa is holding her here, holding the past at bay, and all Clarke has to do is let her.

She doesn’t know what to make of it at all.

“You should come back inside,” Lexa says over the percussion of rain. “It isn’t safe.”

And she wants to. She wants to go back, not just inside the building, not just to a place of shelter, but farther than that. Not just to the base, even, because everything that ever made it home has vanished like morning fog under a hot sun. She wants to go _back_ , to reset the clocks and erase everything that’s happened in the past three days and start them again. To go farther, even, to realize that all of the past two years have been a dream and that when she wakes up, she’ll walk down the stairs to find her father standing in the kitchen with his face full of smiles, one for her mother and another just for Clarke. She’ll find Wells knocking at their door, and Finn with a smirk pulling at his lips, and Raven with no betrayal in her eyes, and her own heart—whole, and fueled by love instead of by fear.

She wants to. But she can’t. And she can’t go back inside the house and be shut in with the heavy air and the loss and the death. A tremor rocks her and she ducks her head. She can’t speak, so she shakes her head, and she hopes Lexa will understand.

A moment or two passes—silent but for the storm in the sky and the storm raging between her ribs that stilts her breathing and jars her bones—before she sees Lexa push herself to her feet. But she doesn’t walk away. Clarke is forced to look up again, ashamed of the fresh tears on her cheeks though in the rain and the falling darkness, it’s doubtful that Lexa can see them.

She’s holding out a pistol. Clarke looks past it, to Lexa’s now impassable expression.

“Take it,” she says, and Clarke does, hesitantly. “Shout if there’s trouble. I’ll hear you.”

And with that, she steps past her and out of her sight. Being alone again is like falling, like she’s hanging over a cliff and the rope she’s clinging to has been cut, like all that lies beneath her is a turbulent sea that pulls her beneath its endless waves. Clarke clutches the gun and leans over, leans her shoulder against the tree trunk and lets her head drop against its bark. Hot tears mingle with cold rain on her cheeks, and thunder rumbles long into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again to maria @makenoteofit on tumblr for telling me when crap didn't make sense :)
> 
> THE ASMY GUARANTEE: if you were not totally satisfied with the product send your complaints to ohmyheda.tumblr.com to receive a full refund of approximately $0.


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